Ben Gurion International Airport - History

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.