On
this date in 1948, President Harry Truman dedicated a recently opened
airport in New York. We know it today as John F Kennedy Airport. !0
things you may not know about JFK:
- It went through several name changes. Before it was built it was going to be called Major General Alexander E. Anderson Airport after a National Guard Commander. By 1948, New York City Council had re-named it New York International Airport, Anderson Field but it was more commonly known as Idlewild Airport until it was re-named in memory of John F. Kennedy in 1963.
- It was built on the site of the Idlewild Golf Course. Idlewild means "peaceful but savage".
- The first plane to land at the new airport was a Peruvian International Airways DC-4, piloted by Captain Douglas Larsen, while the first scheduled flight to land was a Peruvian International Airlines DC-4 from Santiago Chile. Try as I might, I can find no information about the first plane to take off. You'd think somebody somewhere would have made a note of that, but it doesn't seem to have reached the Internet.
- The airport has had to undergo significant modifications as planes get bigger. JFK was designed to accommodate aircraft no larger than a Douglas DC-6, so Boeing 747s presented a challenge which needed to be solved in the late 1960s.
- In March 2007, JFK became the first airport in the United States to receive the Airbus A380 with passengers aboard.
- Today it is the 17th busiest airport in the world (50,423,765 passengers in 2013).
- JFK covers 4,930 acres, of which 880 acres are in the Central Terminal Area. It has about 30 miles of roadway.
- It has the second-longest commercial runway in North America (the longest is a 16,000 feet (4,900 m) runway at Denver International Airport).
- Roughly 35,000 people are employed at the airport.
- It is operated by The Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, under a lease with the City of New York, and has been since it first opened. The lease is set to last until 2050.
No comments:
Post a Comment