Quite Interesting Things about … airports

The saddest-ever unclaimed item at Dublin Airport’s lost-property o ice was a tombstone bearing the words ‘You will always be remembered, never forgotten.’

There are over 41,700 airports in the world, almost one-third of them in the USA.

Passengers at Hong Kong International Airport can de-stress at the nine-hole golf course next to Terminal 2.

King Fahd International Airport in Dammam, Saudi Arabia, takes up 192,000 acres – more than the entire country of Bahrain.

The world’s shortest commercial airport runway is on the Dutch Caribbean island of Saba. It’s only 15,744 inches long.

The world’s oldest airport is College Park, Maryland, founded by Wilbur Wright in 1909.

The world’s prettiest airport is said to be Compton Abbas air eld in Dorset, now owned by lm director Guy Ritchie. In 1993, disgraced tycoon Asil Nadir escaped from there.

In 2017, a Lucky Air ight was grounded at Anqing airport in China and a 76-year-old woman passenger arrested after she threw coins into the plane’s engine for luck.

The average number of connections needed to get from any one airport in the world to another is four.

Davos, host town to the annual World Economic Forum, has no airport. The nearest one is almost 50 miles away.

Gibraltar International Airport’s only runway is bisected by the colony’s busiest road, Winston Churchill Avenue. The road has to be closed every time a plane takes o .

At 6,500 feet, Paro’s runway is shorter than its own height above sea level (7,300 feet). It’s so dangerous only eight pilots are quali ed to land there.

Pilots once identi ed airports using US National Weather Service two-letter shortcodes for cities. When three-letter codes came in, some cities simply added an X – hence LAX for LA.

The airport shortcodes for Nutuve, Papua New Guinea; Funafuti, Tuvalu; Boset, Papua New Guinea; and Butler, Missouri are respectively NUT, FUN, BOT and BUM.

The international airport at Georgetown, Guyana, used to be called Ogle.

Ulaanbaatar International Airport is named after Genghis Khan.

JOHN LLOYD

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