Located near the town of Harbel in Margibi County , the single runway airport is about 35 miles 56 km outside of the nation's capital of Monrovia , and as an origin and destination point is referred to as "Monrovia". Locally, it is often referred to as simply "RIA. The airport is the nation's busiest and most important aviation facility, currently hosting the country's only scheduled commercial airline services, with direct connections to several major cities in West Africa as well as flights to Europe on Brussels Airlines.
The airport reportedly served , passengers annually in and recently underwent a major expansion, including the opening of a new passenger terminal. This commenced a period of strategic road building and other construction related to US military interests in checking the expansion of the Axis powers. The airport was originally built by the U. The runway was built long enough for B Stratojet bombers to land for refueling, giving Liberia what was for many years the longest runway in Africa.
President Franklin D. Roosevelt had lunch with President Edwin J. Barclay at Roberts Field during his visit to Liberia in January Monrovia was consistently a key link in Pan American's African network, usually an intermediate stop between Accra and Dakar , from which service continued onward to Europe and New York.
In the late s and into the early s, the airport became Pan Am 's principal African hub, with a nonstop Boeing service from New York JFK connecting at Robertsfield to such destinations as Dakar , Accra , Abidjan , Lagos , and Conakry , among others, and continuing on to Nairobi and even at times Johannesburg , so that for many years virtually every Pan Am passenger to Africa passed through Robertsfield. Pan Am's presence diminished during the s, as Pan Am's African network was slowly pulled down.
Pan Am ended its management of the airport in [ 8 ] but as late as the airport was still a stop on the JFK-Dakar-Monrovia-Lagos-Nairobi route. As with Pan Am, several African flag carriers utilized Robertsfield as a waystation on transatlantic routes.
