Starting today, people can visit excursions to mark the 85th anniversary of the opening of Prague Airport
Update: 04/05/2022 00:29
Issued by: 04/05/2022, 00:29
Prague – Starting today, people can visit Prague Airport on special excursions for the 85th anniversary of its opening. In this way, they also get to places that are not visited during normal tours, for example historic shelters, the baggage sorting room or the hangar where airplanes are repaired. An interactive exhibition about its history will also open at the airport today. The first plane landed at the Ruzyne airport on the morning of April 5, 1937.
Ten annual excursions are free this week, but according to airport spokesperson Klára Divíšková, they were sold out within 15 minutes of their being made available reservations on the airport website. However, other annual excursions are on offer until the end of April and, unlike classic tours, are roughly half an hour longer at the regular price.
The interactive exhibition in the airport’s Terminal 2 will offer monitors that show the historical development of the airport and its plans for the future, games for children, a photo corner and a display of historical and current uniforms. There will also be a new documentary about the airport combining action and comic scenes. On the website www.letisteslavi85.cz people can watch videos with eyewitnesses about the history of the airport or podcasts with former employees, a pilot and a navigator.
The plan for the creation of a new airport for Prague was approved by the government of Czechoslovakia at the time in 1929. It replaced the airport in Kbely, which no longer had enough capacity. Operations in Ruzyna began with the landing of a Douglas DC-2 airplane of the Czechoslovak State Airlines, and on April 5, 1937, the first foreign airplane landed in Ruzyna. At that time, the airport had two paved grass runways.
Prague Airport handled almost 4.4 million passengers last year. It was almost a fifth more year-on-year, but still less than a quarter of those cleared in 2019 before the spread of the coronavirus epidemic. This year, the Prague airport, named since 2012 after the former president Václav Havel, expects further gradual revival of traffic, especially in the summer.