Tocumen International Airport, Panama City, Panama.

Scenes from Tocumen International Airport in Panama City, filmed in May 2024. The video moves from the departures curb through check-in and the escalators of Terminal 2, along the shops and restaurants of its long glass concourse, and out to the gates, where Copa Airlines 737s are being turned around, before ending with takeoff over the terminal and the Panamanian forest. Tocumen opened on 1 June 1947, about 24 km east of the city center, on land where the Río Tocumen was later diverted to make room for expansion. The original 1947 building survives today as the cargo terminal. Panama's location on the isthmus quickly made the airport a natural hub for air traffice, and by the early 1970s demand had outgrown it. A new terminal, built under the government of General Omar Torrijos, opened on 15 August 1978. After Torrijos's death in a plane crash in 1981 the military regime renamed the airport in his honor; the original name was restored after the US invasion of December 1989, when US paratroopers seized the airport. The building seen in most of this video is Terminal 2, designed by Foster + Partners. Construction began in 2013 and the terminal was inaugurated in 2019, but it did not begin handling passengers until June 2022, at a cost of over US$900 million. Its 20 gates brought the airport's total to 54 and lifted its capacity to around 25 million passengers a year. Terminal 2 is the home of Copa Airlines, whose "Hub of the Americas" strategy uses Panama's central position to connect almost any two cities in the Americas with a single stop. In 2025, the year after I visited Panama and shot this video, Tocumen handled a record 20.98 million passengers, up 9 percent on the previous year, making it the busiest airport in Central America. About three-quarters of its passengers are in transit, never leaving the terminal. I was one of the 25 percent who left the airport, and had a very pleasant stay in Panama City.