Introduction
Dublin is the capital city of Ireland, and at the same time the largest city in the country. Dublin is located in the east part of the country and it was at the beginning a Viking settlement. It is a real cultural center of Ireland, here you can find prestigious museums, theaters or cultural festivals. The city of Dublin also has a rich literary history. In this place known authors like George Bernard Shaw, Samuel Beckett, Oscar Wilde and Jonathan Swift were born. This city is famous for its night life, especially in the Temple Bar district where parties go on until morning.
History
The Dublin airport is the oldest airport in Ireland and also the busiest. The Dublin airport is the place where most of the visitors of Ireland land. On January 19.1940 the Dublin airport was officially opened with a flight to Liverpool. In his early days the airport had just one flight to Liverpool per day. The development of the Dublin airport began in the late 1930s with a terminal building that was designed by the architect Desmond Fitzgerald, the brother of the famous politician Garret Fitzgerald.
During World War II the services of the Dublin airport were seriously restricted until late 1945. In the year 1947 three new runways were added.
The terminal building was designed to resemble the bridge of an ocean liner and this design brought the architect Desmond Fitzgerald many architectural awards. The terminal was designed to have the capacity of just 100,000 passengers per year. Nowadays the terminal is partially used for normal operations but the design features were kept as a reminder of the early days of aviation.
From his early days the Dublin airport evolved a lot, now it has hundreds of destination, as well within Ireland but also around the world. Since the opening day of the airport in 1940 almost 230 million passengers traveled through it.
Features
The first European airline company that had flights to the Dublin airport was KLM. This happened in the year 1947 an shortly after that new concrete runways were finished in the years 1948 and 1950. In just ten years the Dublin airport received a total of 920,000 passengers. In the next years the large number of passengers that arrived to the airport convinced the airport authorities to expand the terminal. In 1971 work began at a new building that was expected to receive six million passengers per year. Since then the airport expanded even more a new terminal was added, new piers, new runway and a taxiway. The new Pier D (Gates 101) was opened in October 2007 and in April 2009 an expansion was added to Terminal 1.
All these new facilities will allow the Dublin airport to have 35 million passengers per year and to keep this airport as the main gate to enter Ireland.
Since the early years the airport evolved greatly and it will continue to evolve and fulfill the needs of its passengers. From the moment you will set foot on Irish soil you will be surrounded by history.
