About the Airport
Only a 20 minute drive from the city, Glasgow Airport is fast becoming one of Scotand’s biggest commercial success stories. With a massive 8.7 million passengers travelling through there last year alone, the international airport has been expanding and growing rapidly ever since its inaugural opening in 1966. The second busiest airport in Scotland, (and eighth in the whole of Great Britain) it originally started out at as a bustling RAF base, opened in 1932 before World War II. Supermarine Spitfires launched offensives against the Axis forces, but before the War was ended the base changed hands to the Navy.
Continuing the tradition of naming Royal Navy bases like ships, the airport was christened with the name ‘Sanderling’ and was used for training and storage purposes right up until 1963. When the base became an airport, the ship’s bell was donated to the bar with the drinking hole taking the naval base’s name as its own. It took three more years, a relocation and £4.2 million for the airport to be ready to be opened by Queen Elizabeth II.
Thirty years later, the airport was in need of another refurbishment. Like most other 60s airports, the architecture was beginning to visibly age and passenger capacity was limited. By 2003, several extensions and remodels had gifted the airport with a total of 38 gates, leaving it with the capability of handling up to nine million individual passengers a year. From this point onwards, the rate of passengers flying in and out of Glasgow built each year, peaking in 2008. After a significant drop during the fallout of the Global financial crisis, numbers began to return to their original heights.