Dublin Airport (IATA: DUB, ICAO: EIDW),
or Aerfort Bhaile Átha Cliath in Irish,
is operated by the Dublin
Airport Authority plc. It is by far the busiest airport in Ireland.
Two major milestones occurred at Dublin Airport in 2006. Passenger
numbers in June passed the two million mark for the first time in
a single month (this was repeated in July, August, and September).
On 8 December the
airport welcomed its 20 millionth passenger of the year.
Passenger traffic at Dublin Airport is predominantly international;
only 810,000 of its 21.1 million passengers in 2006 were domestic.
The airport is located approximately 10 kilometres north of Dublin
City in an area known as Collinstown. The airport is the headquarters
of Ireland's flag carrier Aer
Lingus, and Europe's largest no-frills airline Ryanair.
Ireland's third airline, CityJet,
is based in the nearby town of Swords.
Ireland's domestic and regional airline, Aer
Arann, provides domestic and several UK and European routes
from Dublin, but its base is Galway
Airport in the west of Ireland.
Dublin Airport has an extensive short and medium-haul route network
several domestic Irish routes, around thirty routes to its nearest
neighbour, Great
Britain, and a vast network of routes to Continental Europe.
The Dublin-London international air corridor is the second busiest
in the world (after Hong Kong-Taipei) with flights from Dublin to
all five London airports: Heathrow, Gatwick, Stansted, Luton, and
London City. Aer Lingus and several US and Canadian carriers provide
services to many destinations in the United
States and Canada.
Dublin and Shannon (on
the west coast of Ireland) are the only two European airports with U.S.
border preclearance facilities which saves passengers a lot of
time upon arrival in the United States (only immigration checks are
performed, with customs and agriculture inspections still done on
arrival in the U.S. — therefore passengers from the Republic
of Ireland must still land at international terminals). Full US Customs
and Border Protection (CBP) facilities are planned to be developed
in Terminal 2's Pier E, which will allow complete US processing of
passengers (Immigration, Customs and Agriculture) and obviate the
need for any further inspection on arrival in the US.
There are also non-stop flights to Bahrain (Gulf
Air) [To end July] and Dubai (Aer
Lingus) in the Middle
East. Etihad
Airways are to commence direct non-stop flights to Abu
Dhabi from July 2007. This is of major significance to the
airport as these flights will provide the first same-airline one-stop
flights to Australia,
dispensing with the need to change airlines at airports such as
Heathrow, Paris-CDG, or Frankfurt. Charter flights to north Africa
(Morocco, Agadir) and South Africa are also growing in popularity.
History
In 1936 the Irish
Government established a new civil airline, Aer
Lingus, which began operating from the military aerodrome at
Baldonnel to the south of Dublin. However, the decision was made
that a civil airport should replace Baldonnel as the city's airport.
Collinstown, to the north of Dublin, was selected as the location
for the new civil aerodrome. Construction of the new airport began
in 1937. By the end of 1939 a grass runway, internal roads, car
parks and electrical power and lighting were set up. The inaugural
flight from Dublin took place on January
19, 1940 to Liverpool.
In 1940 work began on a new airport terminal building. The terminal
building design was penned by the architect Desmond
Fitzgerald, brother of politician Garret
Fitzgerald.[1] It opened in
1941 and was modelled on the bridge of a luxury liner. It was also
awarded the Triennial Gold Medal of the Royal Hibernian Institute
of Architects and is today a listed building. Services were
severely curtailed at Dublin Airport due to World
War II; however, afterwards three new concrete runways were
built and completed by 1947.
Throughout the 1950s Dublin Airport expanded with virtually uninterrupted
traffic growth. Runway extensions and terminal enhancements were
carried out to deal with the influx of traffic and passengers. New
airlines began serving the airport also. These included British
European Airways, Sabena and
BKS. In 1958 a new transatlantic service was started by Aer Lingus
via Shannon
Airport. During the 1960s the number of scheduled carriers continued
to grow and aircraft continued to evolve with technological, advancement.
By the close of the sixties, a sizeable number of Boeing
737s, BAC
One-Elevens, Boeing
707s, and Hawker
Siddeley Tridents were using Dublin Airport on a regular basis.
During 1969, 1,737,151 passengers travelled through Dublin Airport.
The advent of wide-bodied aircraft posed opportunities and challenges
for aviation. In 1971 Aer
Lingus took delivery of two new Boeing
747 aircraft (a third Boeing 747 was delivered later that decade).
To cope with this, a new passenger terminal capable of handling five
million passengers per year was opened in 1972. The growth which
was anticipated at the airport (and provided for through heavy investment
by the airport and Aer Lingus) during the 1970s did not materialise
immediately.
In 1983 Aer Lingus opened its 'Aer Lingus Commuter' division which
took delivery of Shorts, Saab, and Fokker turboprop aircraft to open
regular daily domestic services to and from Ireland's smaller regional
airports for the first time, as well as to serve existing routes
to smaller regional airports in the United Kingdom. At various stages
of its operations, flights were operated to several Irish regional
airports to feed passengers into Aer Lingus's international network.
These domestic destinations included Cork
Airport, Shannon
Airport, Kerry
Airport, Galway
Airport, Knock
Airport, Waterford
Airport, Sligo
Airport, and City
of Derry Airport in Northern Ireland. Aer Lingus Commuter has
since been re-absorbed into the main company. The domestic routes
have been taken over by Aer
Arann, with British
Airways taking over the route to Derry in Northern Ireland. Aer
Lingus has continued with the remaining Dublin-UK flights.
During the 1980s, major competition, especially on the Dublin-London
routes, resulted in passenger numbers swelling to 5.1 million in
1989. In the same year a new 8,650-foot runway and a state-of-the-art
air traffic control centre were opened. Dublin Airport continued
to expand rapidly in the 1990s. Pier A, which had been the first
extension to the old terminal building, was significantly extended.
A new Pier C, complete with air bridges, was built and as soon as
this was completed, work commenced to extend it to double its capacity.
The ground floor of the original terminal building, which is today
a listed building, was returned to passenger service after many years
to provide additional departure gates.
In 1993 a major milestone for the airport was the signing of a new United
States-Republic
of Ireland bilateral agreement which allowed airlines to operate
some direct transatlantic services for the first time to/from Dublin
Airport instead of touching down en route at Shannon Airport on
the west coast of Ireland (Shannon had once been a major transatlantic
refuelling stop for pre-jet aircraft, and this agreement was designed
to protect the interests of the Shannon region when modern jets
no longer required a refuelling stop and Shannon saw a fall-off
in traffic). Airlines still had to provide an equal number of flights
either to or through Shannon as to Dublin. A gradual further watering
down of Shannon's so-called 'stopover' status will come into effect
in November 2006 when more direct flights to Dublin will be allowed,
until the stopover requirement disappears completely in 2008. At
that time, airlines will be allowed to fly direct to the US from
Dublin without having to match these with any to/from Shannon.
It is expected that this will result in a huge increase in services
between Dublin and the US, and Aer Lingus has identified 16 destinations
that it would like to serve direct from Dublin.
This of course casts doubt on the future of transatlantic flights
to Shannon. However, there is definitely a large demand, and up until
now, the 'stopover' has not deterred Aer Lingus and several US airlines
from offering either dedicated Shannon-US flights to allow them to
fly to Dublin direct, or stopping at Shannon on one leg of their
Dublin-US flights. Either way, the business community in Ireland
believes that the removal of the 'stopover' is long overdue and has
long prevented Dublin, with its perfect location at the western end
of Europe, from becoming a major hub between
that continent and North America.[citation
needed] One counter-argument to that has been that
Dublin did not generate sufficient traffic of its own to support
this 'hub' theory. However that is certainly no longer the case.[citation
needed]
With the success of the Republic of Ireland's 'Celtic
Tiger' economy, Dublin Airport has seen growth in the 1990s
and 2000s. This demand has been driven by an increased demand for
business travel to and from the country, together with an increase
in inward tourism, and a surge in demand for foreign holidays and
city breaks from the Irish, who are now one of the wealthiest populations
in the world. In January 2006, the number of trips abroad taken
by the Irish outnumbered the number of inbound trips for the first
time since records began. Christmas shopping weekends in New York
have increased in popularity (although London is still the top
destination from Dublin). A further source of demand has been for
flights to holiday homes and investment properties which have been
snapped up by the property-hungry Irish across southern European
holiday hotspots, the emerging economies of Eastern Europe, and
beyond.
Finally, the demand from Ireland's migrant workers, principally
those from Eastern Europe, has resulted in a large number of new
routes opening to destinations in the European
Union accession states. Ireland was one of only three European
Union countries (as well as the United
Kingdom and Sweden)
to open its borders freely to workers from the ten accession states
that joined the European
Union in 2004. This resulted in hundreds of thousands of people
moving to Ireland from these countries since then.
To give just one example of the 'Eastern Europe' effect, both LOT
Polish Airlines and Aer
Lingus separately opened a Warsaw-Dublin route in 2004 to coincide
with Poland joining the European
Union. A patchy schedule was operated at first to test demand,
but both airlines have since gone daily with this route, with LOT
going double daily several days a week and Aer Lingus putting the
larger Airbus A321 on the route. As of early 2007 - three years
after Poland joined the European
Union - there are direct flights to ten cities in Poland alone,
with a choice of several airlines on many routes. The Polish market
grew from 143,000 passengers in 2005 to 580,000 in 2006 - an increase
of over 400%. The Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia,
and Lithuania are
also connected with direct flights to Dublin,
as are the Czech
Republic, Hungary, Slovakia,
and Slovenia.
