In 1967,
Transportes Aéreos de Timor (TAT), the national airline of the then
Portuguese Timor, was operating flights between
Baucau and Oecusse, with two
de Havilland Doves. In 1974 and 1975, TAT was flying scheduled domestic services from
Dili to Oecusse. As of the mid-1990s, an Indonesian state-owned airline,
Merpati Nusantara Airlines, was flying into Oecusse. Immediately prior to its redevelopment in the 2010s, the airport site was an essentially abandoned and nonfunctional airfield with an unpaved runway. It had no terminal, control tower or any other type of physical structure. As of 2014, its runway was a grass landing strip, long and wide. That year, the government of Timor-Leste planned to carry out a provisional rehabilitation of the airfield site, including the erection of a wire perimeter fence, a clean up and repair of the runway and aviation equipment, and the installation of a provisional control tower and allied facilities. at a total cost of . The contractor for the development project was giant Indonesian
state-owned enterprise , and ISQ (Portugal) acted as a project consultant. One of the airport's new
jet bridges was used on that occasion, but neither has been used ever since. The airport is regarded by critics of the Oecusse-Ambeno Special Administrative Region (RAEOA) project as being the most prominent negative symbol of investments in the region, which they consider to be excessive, at least for the time being. ==Facilities==