History
Seventy Years And Counting
It all began at 9:00am on a cold Thursday in January 1940 when Dublin Airport was officially opened with the departure on January 19 of an Aer Lingus Lockheed 14 aircraft bound for Liverpool. In 1940, Collinstown Airport, as it was known then, had just one flight a day to Liverpool.
Today Dublin Airport caters for an average 67,000 passengers every day.
In the late 1930s 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 and many of the internal design features of the building have been retained as a reminder of those early days of aviation.
The new Collinstown Airport remained relatively quiet during the 1940s as war raged throughout Europe. However, Aer Lingus continued to operate a twice-weekly service to Liverpool.
By 1947 flights departing from Dublin had ventured as far as Continental Europe, with Dutch airline KLM beginning the first European service to Dublin. New concrete runways were completed in 1948, and in 1950 after ten years in operation, the airport had been used by a total of 920,000 passengers.
Today, 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 could no longer cope well with the passenger demand. Work began in 1971 on a new building to cater for an expected six million passengers annually.
The airport has greatly expanded since then with the addition of a new terminal, new piers, an extension to the 1971 terminal building, and a new runway and taxiways.
Dublin Airport’s spacious new Pier D (Gates 101) boarding gate facility opened in October 2007 followed in April 2009 with an extension to Terminal 1.
Since 2006, the Transforming Dublin Airport investment programme has also seen the construction of a new terminal and pier at Dublin Airport. The new terminal officially opened on November 19, 2010 with scheduled services beginning on November 23.
These new facilities will allow the airport to comfortably handle up to 35 million passengers per year and ensure that Dublin Airport remains the premier gateway for Ireland well into the 21st Century.
