Sphinx Airport: Complete Transfer & Travel Guide

Sphinx International Airport (IATA code: SPX, ICAO code: HESX) is a passenger airport near the Giza Plateau, built to sit close to Egypt's most visited attractions: the Pyramids of Giza, the Great Sphinx and the Grand Egyptian Museum. It was announced in 2017 and opened to commercial flights in 2018, developed to give tourists a faster route into the Giza area without routing through the larger, busier Cairo International Airport.

The airport sits on the Cairo-Alexandria desert road near the town of Kerdasa in Giza Governorate, sharing its site with the older Cairo West Air Base -- roughly 35 km from 6th of October City and about 46 km from Cairo International Airport. It primarily handles domestic connections to destinations such as Hurghada, Sharm El-Sheikh, Luxor and Aswan, alongside international and charter carriers including Wizz Air, easyJet, Air Arabia and flydubai.

"Sphinx Airport" is also the name of our transfer company. We are an independent, licensed tourist transport operator — not the airport itself or its operator — and we specialise in getting travellers from SPX (or Cairo International Airport, or any hotel in Egypt) to their destination safely and on time.

Whatever brought you here — flight times, distances, or planning your ground transport — the sections below and our articles cover the most common questions travellers ask about Sphinx Airport.

Sphinx International Airport was first announced in 2017, began trial and experimental flights in late 2018 / January 2019, and has expanded steadily since — Air Cairo started operating from an upgraded terminal in November 2022, and low-cost carriers such as Wizz Air Egypt have added routes as the airport has grown.

It is a single-terminal airport: one compact main building (around 4,000 m² of terminal space on a roughly 24,000 m² site) handles both domestic and international departures and arrivals, with a processing capacity of around 900 passengers an hour and an annual capacity of about 1.5 million passengers following recent upgrades. As with most Egyptian airports, it's worth arriving at least 3 hours before an international departure and around 2 hours before a domestic one, since security screening and passport control can take longer at busier times.

Around a dozen airlines currently serve Sphinx Airport, including Wizz Air, Wizz Air UK, Wizz Air Malta, easyJet, Air Arabia, flydubai, Jazeera Airways, Flynas, Pegasus Airlines, SalamAir, Air Cairo, Swiss and Edelweiss Air, connecting Giza to destinations across Europe, the Gulf and North Africa alongside Egypt's domestic network. The airport connects to roughly two dozen destinations. Istanbul is typically the busiest route, and the two longest scheduled flights run to Manchester and London Luton, each around five and a half hours; domestically, Sphinx Airport also links to airports such as Abu Simbel.