History
The airport began as an airstrip of four concrete runways on the outskirts of the Arab town of Lydda. It was built in 1936, during the British Mandate for Palestine, chiefly for military purposes. First known as Wilhelma airport, it was renamed RAF Station Lydda in 1943. During World War II it served as a major airfield for military air transport and aircraft ferry operations between military bases in Europe, Africa, the Middle East (mainly Iraq and Persia) and South/Southeast Asia.
The first civilian transatlantic route, New York City to Tel Aviv, was inaugurated by TWA in 1946. The British gave up Lydda airport at the end of April 1948. Soldiers of the Israel Defence Force captured the airport on 10 July 1948, in Operation Danny, transferring control to the newly declared State of Israel. Flights resumed on 24 November 1948. That year, 40,000 passengers passed through the terminal. By 1952, the number had risen to 100,000 a month. Within a decade, air traffic increased to the point where local flights had to be redirected to the Sde Dov airfield (SDV) on the northern Tel Aviv coast. By the mid-1960s, 14 international airlines were landing at Lod Airport.
The airport was renamed Ben Gurion International Airport in 1973 to honour Israel's first Prime Minister, David Ben-Gurion.
More buildings and runways were added over the years, but with the onset of mass immigration from Ethiopia and the former Soviet Union in the 1980s and 90s, as well as the global increase of international business travel, the existing facilities became painfully inadequate, prompting the design of new state-of-the-art terminal that could also accommodate the expected tourism influx for the 2000 millennium celebrations. The decision to go ahead with project was reached in January 1994, but Terminal 3 only opened its doors a decade later, on 2 November 2004.
Read more about this topic: Ben Gurion International Airport
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““And now this is the way in which the history of your former life has reached my ears!” As he said this he held out in his hand the fatal letter.”
—Anthony Trollope (1815–1882)
“What has history to do with me? Mine is the first and only world! I want to report how I find the world. What others have told me about the world is a very small and incidental part of my experience. I have to judge the world, to measure things.”
—Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951)
“In history the great moment is, when the savage is just ceasing to be a savage, with all his hairy Pelasgic strength directed on his opening sense of beauty;—and you have Pericles and Phidias,—and not yet passed over into the Corinthian civility. Everything good in nature and in the world is in that moment of transition, when the swarthy juices still flow plentifully from nature, but their astrigency or acridity is got out by ethics and humanity.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)