Edinburgh Airport Totally Explained

Everything about Edinburgh Airport totally explained

Edinburgh Airport is located in Edinburgh, Scotland, and was the busiest airport in Scotland in 2007, handling 9,047,558 passengers. It was also the seventh busiest airport in the UK by passengers and the fifth busiest by air transport movements., and is itself owned by an international consortium led by the Spanish Ferrovial Group.
   The airport is a hub for easyJet, flyglobespan and Ryanair.
   The present terminal building, designed by Robert Matthew, was constructed in 1977 and has been upgraded in recent years, with new car parking facilities and an extended arrivals hall. A new control tower was completed in 2005.
   There are plans for expansion of the airport, with passenger numbers expected to reach 26 million per annum by 2030.

History

Turnhouse Aerodrome was the most northerly British air defence base in World War I. The small base opened in 1915 and it was used to house the 603 (City of Edinburgh) Squadron, which consisted of DH 9As, Westland Wapitis, Hawker Harts, and Hawker Hind light bombers. All the aircraft used a grass air strip.
   In 1918 the Royal Air Force was formed and the airfield was named RAF Turnhouse and ownership transferred to the Ministry of Defence.
   When World War II broke out, fighter command took control over the airfield and a runway of 3,900ft was paved to handle the Vickers Supermarine Spitfire.
   When the war ended the airfield still remained under military control, but by the late 1940s the first commercial services were launched. In 1947, British European Airways started a service between Edinburgh and London using Vickers Vikings followed by the Viscount and Vanguard series. In 1952 the runway was extended to 6000ft to handle the Vampire FB5s. In 1956 a new passenger terminal was built to offer improved commercial service and five years later it was extended. The Ministry of Defence transferred ownership to the Ministry of Aviation in 1960 to offer improved commercial service to the airport. In 1971 the British Airports Authority took over the airport and immediately started to expand it by constructing a new runway and terminal building.
   Although the original runway 13/31 (which is now 12/30) served the airport well, its alignment had the disadvantage of suffering from severe crosswinds, so movements were transferred to a new runway (07/25, which is has since become 06/24). This runway, completed in 1977 is 8399ft in length, and was able to take all modern airliners. A new terminal was built alongside the runway to cater for the additional traffic. The old terminal and hangars were converted into a cargo centre.
   The only international services from Edinburgh during the 1980s were to Amsterdam and Dublin, but in the following years links were opened to destinations in France and Germany. By the end of the decade BAA had been privatised and funds were used to extend the current terminal building and create parking aprons.
   In 2005, a new 57 metre tall air traffic control tower was completed at a cost of £10m (€16m).
   An extension to the terminal opened in September 2006. This added six gates on a new pier to the North-East of the earlier building. History of Edinburgh Airport's passenger numbers(External Link

)(External Link

Year	Passengers
1995	3,280,000
1996	3,810,000
1997	4,160,000
1998	4,540,000
1999	5,090,000
2000	5,494,000
2001	6,038,341
2002	6,930,649
2003	7,481,454
2004	8,017,577
2005	8,456,739
2006	8,611,345
2007	9,047,558
2020	20,000,000 (projected)
2030	26,000,000 (projected)

Airlines and destinations

Aer Arann (Cork, Galway)
Aer Lingus (Dublin)
Air France
- operated by CityJet (London-City, Paris-Charles de Gaulle)
Air Transat (Toronto-Pearson)
BH Air (Bourgas, Varna, Plovdiv)
bmi (London-Heathrow)
- operated by bmi Regional (Brussels, Copenhagen, Leeds/Bradford, Manchester, Zurich)
bmibaby (Birmingham, Cardiff, East Midlands)
British Airways (London-Gatwick, London-Heathrow)
- operated by BA CityFlyer (London-City)
- operated by Loganair (Inverness, Isle of Man, Kirkwall, Lerwick, Sumburgh, Stornoway, Wick) [ends25 October]
Centralwings (Gdańsk, Warsaw)
Cimber Air (Billund)
Clickair (Barcelona) [seasonal]
Continental Airlines (Newark)
Delta Air Lines (New York-JFK)
easyJet (Alicante, Amsterdam, Belfast-International, Bristol, Dortmund, Geneva, Kraków, London-Gatwick, London-Luton, London-Stansted, Madrid, Milan-Malpensa, Munich, Nice, Palma de Mallorca, Paris-Charles de Gaulle)
Eurocypria Airlines (Larnaca, Paphos)
Flybe (Belfast-City, Birmingham, Cardiff, Exeter, Manchester, Newquay, Norwich, Rennes, Southampton)
- operated by Loganair (Inverness, Isle of Man, Kirkwall, Lerwick, Sumburgh, Stornoway, Wick) [begins26 October]
Flyglobespan (Alicante, Arrecife, Barcelona, Dubrovnik, Faro, Funchal, Geneva, Ibiza, Málaga, Nice, Palma de Mallorca, Paphos, Pula, Rome-Fiumicino, Sharm el-Sheikh, Tenerife-South, Toronto-Hamilton)
First Choice Airways (Faro) [seasonal]
Futura International Airways (Palma de Mallorca)
Germanwings (Cologne/Bonn)
Iberworld (Las Palmas, Madrid, Tenerife-South)
Jet2.com (Avignon, Chambery, La Rochelle, Murcia, Pisa, Prague, Toulouse)
Karthago Airlines (Monastir)
KLM Royal Dutch Airlines (Amsterdam)
- operated by KLM Cityhopper (Amsterdam)
Lufthansa (Frankfurt)
Monarch Airlines (Alicante, Dalaman, Faro, Fuerteventura, Las Palmas, Palma de Mallorca, Paphos, Reus, Tenerife-South, Zakynthos)
Norwegian Air Shuttle (Oslo)
Onur Air (Bodrum, Dalaman)
Ryanair (Alicante, Berlin-Schönefeld [begins24 September], Billund [begins24 September], Bournemouth [begins23 September], Bratislava [begins24 September], Bremen, Dublin, Frankfurt-Hahn, Krakow [begins23 September], Lodz [begins23 September], Malaga [begins23 September], Marseille, Palma de Mallorca [begins23 September], Pisa, Poznan [begins24 September], Shannon, Stockholm-Skavsta [begins24 September], Weeze [begins4 June], Wrocław [begins25 September])
Scandinavian Airlines System (Stockholm-Arlanda)
Sterling Airlines (Copenhagen, Stockholm-Arlanda)
Thomsonfly (Palma de Mallorca) [seasonal]
Widerøe (Bergen)

Cargo airlines

Atlantic Airlines (Coventry)

DHL (East Midlands)

operated by Exin (Aberdeen)

Jet2.com (East Midlands, London-Stansted)

Titan Airways (Bristol, London-Stansted)

UPS

operated by Star Air (Cologne, East Midlands)

2007 Traffic Statistics

Busiest International Routes out of Edinburgh Airport (2007)>

Rank	Airport	Passengers handled	% Change
1	Amsterdam Airport Schiphol	502,435	9.96
2	Dublin Airport	444,557	6.27
3	Charles de Gaulle International Airport	240,177	37.19
4	Frankfurt Airport	176,358	1.60
5	Newark Liberty International Airport	153,444	15.42
6	Son Sant Joan Airport	125,937	7.51
7	Geneva Cointrin International Airport	117,395	14.60
8	Málaga Airport	113,519	35.53
9	Alicante Airport	108,425	4.20
10	Barcelona International Airport	94,507	39.33
11	Madrid Barajas International Airport	88,360	302.66
12	Faro Airport (Portugal)	79,330	16.87
13	Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport	75,284	24.81
14	Munich Airport	69,863	0.00
15	Murcia-San Javier Airport	55,847	4.42

Future plans

In July 2007 BAA announced it would be expanding the current departures hall

to add extra waiting areas, shops and restaurants for the increase in passengers. Also it would extend the south east pier to add three more gates to increase capacity, but it's rumoured that these will be for large aircraft. BAA also plans to resurface the runway as part of their £1 billion investment in the airport.
The Airport is also lobbying the City of Edinburgh Council to construct an access road from the Gogar roundabout in an attempt to relieve congestion on the busy approach road. They are also urging the Scottish Executive to construct a direct link road from the M8 motorway.
The Edinburgh tram network is due to connect to Edinburgh Airport in 2011 (External Link

) BAA has made provision in its Master Plan for the airport for an extension to the current runway 06/24, which would allow larger aircraft to serve longer haul destinations. There are plans to expand further by adding a new runway and terminal by 2020 which would accommodate up to 20 million passengers per annum(External Link

). BAA projects that by 2030 Edinburgh Airport will be handling 26 million passengers per annum[http://www.edinburghairport.com/portal/page/EDI%5EEdinburgh+Press+Releases/006ec1dd15d6c010VgnVCM20000039821c0a /].

Accidents

On 27 February 2001, a Loganair Shorts 360 (G-BNMT) operating a Royal Mail flight to Belfast, crashed into the Firth of Forth shortly after taking off from Edinburgh at 1730 GMT. Both crew members were killed, but there were no passengers on board. A fatal accident inquiry later blamed a build up of slush in the aircraft's engines for the crash. Protective covering hadn't been fitted to the engine intakes while the aircraft was parked for several hours in heavy snow at Edinburgh.

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