President Joko Widodo on Thursday officially introduced the Toraja Airport located in the Tana Toraja Regency, South Sulawesi. During the inauguration, Jokowi boasted the project that spent roughly Rp800 billion as it must flattened three hills.
“Finally, this airport is operable and introduced. I asked the Minister how much it cost to build this airport and he said around Rp800 billion and had to cut through three hills and 6 million cubic meters of land,” said the President on March 18.
The government claimed that the hills were needed to be ‘cut’ to lay down the foundation for the 2,000-meter Toraja Airport runway.
President Jokowi hopes that the existence of the full-sized airport will better accommodate people’s mobility and transport of goods. The region had been depending on land transportation and would need a 9-hour travel to reach Makassar before the airport existed.
“But now I tried it with an ATR and only took 50 minutes,” said the President who hopes the Toraja Airport will also increase the accessibility for tourism in the area.