A Brief History

The airport began life around 1934 primarily as a training airfield but with the onset of WWII, the airport developed rapidly in order to handle the large volume of American aircraft.

In 1938 passenger facilities were added, and were used continuously until the implementation of an investment programme to make Prestwick compatible with the new jets which were becoming available in 1960s.

Scottish Aviation built a factory using the original terminal building and hangars at Prestwick and when Scottish Aviation merged with British Aerospace, BAE maintained aircraft production at the site until 1998

Originally, Prestwick was the only Scottish airport allowed to operate a transatlantic link, largely due to the very good weather conditions on the Ayrshire coast. With much lower fog than any other airport in Great Britain Prestwick is the only guaranteed "fog-free" airport in the UK. This is perhaps why it managed to avoid total closure when it appeared that BAA seemed to be running down operations.

Although BA had ceased regular passenger operations in the late 1970s they continued to intermittently use Prestwick as a site for pilot training, especially for Concorde pilots.

Prestwick Airport is also famous because it is the only UK territory that Elvis Presley set foot on, when his US Army transport plane stopped, whilst en route from Germany.

Traffic

1994 marked the beginning of a recovery for the struggling airport. It took the move of building its own railway station on the existing Glasgow-Ayr line, which runs straight past the airfield. Then, Ryanair opened a route to the airport from Dublin and London in 1995.

The growth of European no-frills airlines in the late 1990s has seen Prestwick grow even larger. Ryanair now serves 20 destinations from Prestwick and other budget airlines have also moved into the airport.