A humanitarian air hub has been set up in Malaysia to feed at least 400,000 tsunami survivors in Indonesia's Aceh province over the next week, the World Food Programme (WFP) said today.

The United Nations and other aid agencies established the base at Subang military airport in Kuala Lumpur to overcome congestion problems at Indonesia's overwhelmed airports, WFP executive director James Morris told reporters here.

"In a matter of five, six or seven days we will feed 400,000 people, depending on the extent of the damage on the western coast (of Aceh)," Morris said.

"The numbers could go to as high as one million. Hopefully that will not be the case."

One of the major problems of the relief effort in Aceh has been the inability of the airports at Banda Aceh, the provincial capital, and Medan, the capital of the adjoining North Sumatra province, to cope with the huge number of flights bringing in supplies.

"The air hub will not only relieve the extreme congestion in the two airports in Sumatra, but will sharply reduce travel time," Morris said.

Flying time from Subang to Medan and Banda Aceh is 90 minutes and two hours respectively. It takes more than twice that amount of time to fly to the two cities from Jakarta, he said.

Morris said the air hub went operational on Friday with a Malaysian airforce C-130 Hercules transport plane flying to Banda Aceh with the first delivery of an eventual 700 metric tonnes of fortified biscuits.

The Malaysian airforce, the UN Humanitarian Air Service and the UN joint logistics centre are jointly managing the air hub.

Bottlenecks in Banda Aceh, Medan

In Banda Aceh, the spokesman for the International Organisation for Migration's Indonesian operations, Chris Lom, also said the bottlenecks at Banda Aceh and Medan continued to be a significant problem.

"These are little provincial airports that can't handle that many C-130's landing so many times a day, as well as so many trucks coming in," Lom said.

"It's an extraordinary situation which they weren't prepared to handle. They don't have the space to store all the supplies."

Lom said the IOM, which is coordinating much of the relief effort in Aceh for the UN, would start trucking in supplies from Jakarta because of the backlog problem.

More than 104,000 people in Indonesia died in the Dec 26 earthquake and tsunami disaster, with virtually all of the fatalities in Aceh.