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Dublin Airport Celebrates 70 Years - 19, January 2010

It all began at 9.00am on Thursday January 19, 1940. Dublin Airport was officially opened when an Aer Lingus Lockheed 14 aircraft departed Dublin for Liverpool. Collinstown Airport, as it was known then, had just one flight a day to Liverpool whereas 70 years later Dublin Airport is a hive of activity, catering for an average 67,000 passengers every day.

The airport has reached many milestones since it first opened for business. In the late 1930's planning and development began on a terminal building and grass runways at the Collinstown site. The architect of the new terminal building was Desmond Fitzgerald, an elder brother of former Taoiseach, Dr. Garret Fitzgerald. The curved building was designed to echo the lines of the bridge of a great ocean liner and won many architectural awards for its design. This original terminal building, now known as the Old Central Terminal Building (OCTB), was designed to cater for just 100,000 passengers a year. Today the terminal is still partially used for daily passenger operations. Many of the internal design features of the building have been retained as a reminder of those early halcyon days of aviation.

The new Collinstown (Dublin) Airport remained relatively quiet during the 1940's as war raged throughout Europe. However, Aer Lingus continued to operate a twice-weekly service to Liverpool. During this period Dublin Airport was required to observe blackouts imposed at the airport during the war years and in March 1941 Cleary's Department store was asked to supply 2,200 yards of blackout material for the terminal building.   

By 1947 flights departing from Dublin ventured as far as Europe, with Dutch airline KLM beginning the first continental service to Dublin. New concrete runways were completed in 1948, and in 1950, after ten years in operation, the airport had been used by 920,000 passengers. Just over 248 million passengers have travelled through Dublin Airport since that first flight took off in 1940.

Within another couple of decades it became apparent that the original terminal building had far exceeded its capacity. Work began in 1971 on a new building to cater for an expected six million passengers annually. The airport has expanded and developed since then with the addition of new piers, an extension to the terminal building, a new runway and taxiways to cater for the ever-increasing demand for air travel.

Dublin Airport’s spacious new Pier D boarding gate facility opened in October 2007, offering passengers a transformed travel experience. This was followed in April 2009 when an extension to Terminal One was opened radically improving the travel experience for passengers using the A and D boarding gates at Dublin Airport. The new facility provides more circulation space for passengers and additional airside retail and catering options for passengers.
Dublin Airport is now engaged in a €2 billion capital development programme that will see the construction of a new second terminal in 2010. The T2 project includes a new terminal building and departures gate area called Pier E. The T2 development also includes a new energy efficient power plant and a major upgrade of the airport’s campus road network. These new facilities will allow Dublin Airport to comfortably handle up to 35 million passengers per year and will create a vibrant modern airport that will be an efficient gateway to the Ireland of the 21st century.