South Korea’s Defense Ministry has selected Mangun-myeon in Muan County as the candidate area for relocating Gwangju’s military airport, moving a long-running regional project into a more concrete approval phase. The ministry said Friday that its site-selection committee concluded the area met both institutional feasibility and social-consensus criteria.
Local approval now becomes the decisive step
- Candidate area
- Mangun-myeon, Muan County
- Final approval
- Not yet
- Target completion
- December 2032
The decision is not the final relocation approval. The government and local authorities must now prepare a support package for communities around the proposed site, followed by a resident vote and a formal application from the Muan county chief. Only after those steps can the relocation site be finally selected. That sequence gives Muan residents a direct role in determining whether candidate status turns into an actual airbase project.
The relocation also matters beyond aviation. The current Gwangju military-airport site has been designated for a Honam-region semiconductor industrial cluster, meaning delays in moving the base can affect the timetable for redeveloping strategically valuable land in Gwangju. The government wants to complete the site-selection process within the year and has described a schedule that would move into design and construction next year, with completion of the Muan military airport targeted for December 2032. Those dates remain dependent on the local approval and planning steps that have not yet been completed.
The next phase will test whether the government can translate regional-development benefits into terms acceptable to the community receiving the military facility. Officials say detailed support measures for Muan will now be developed. The central trade-off is clear: Gwangju gains a path to free its existing military-airport land for industrial development, while Muan must decide whether compensation and surrounding-area investment are sufficient for the noise, land-use and security footprint that a military airport would bring.