Sir Barry Bowen Municipal Airport
airport in Belize

Sir Barry Bowen Municipal Airport (formerly Belize City Municipal Airport) (IATA: TZA, ICAO: MZBE) is an airport serving Belize City, Belize. It is only one mile from the city center, and is more centrally located to the city than is Belize City International Airport. It mostly provides travel to Belize's cayes, allowing faster passage to the cayes than by boat or water taxi. The airport is named after the late Belizean politician and entrepreneur Barry Bowen.
The head office of Maya Island Air is on the airport. Tropic Air also has a terminal at this airport with multiple flights every day.
Facilities
In 2012, a project to upgrade and modernize the airport was initiated. Improvements included extending the runway, constructing a new access road, adding a taxiway, and installing a new lighting system. The project was completed in November 2016 at a total cost of BZ$17 million.
Airlines and destinations
Shuttles
Belize Shuttles and Private Transfers provides regularly scheduled shuttles from the airport to Placencia, San Ignacio, Hopkins, and water taxi terminals.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Sir Barry Bowen Municipal Airport” is airport in Belize. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Barry, Bowen and Municipal, not as a finished interpretation.
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Place names and jurisdictional language are key evidence: both can reveal earlier catalogue descriptions and overlooked record series. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jul 7, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q1657585. Authority coordinates are 17.516, -88.192. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 2012 and 2016.
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This entry incorporates text from “Sir Barry Bowen Municipal Airport” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.