Airport Guide

History of Glasgow Prestwick Airport

Unlike most UK airports, Glasgow Prestwick began life in peacetime, serving as a training field from 1935 for pioneer aviators, including the first man to fly over Mount Everest, the Duke of Hamilton.

Inevitably, once the war began, the airport was significantly modified so as to cope with the larger planes of the US Air Force, though passenger services also operated alongside military traffic.

After decades of moderate use, the site was subjected to major renovation with the dawn of the jet engine age in 1964, just two years before the US military pulled out altogether. After this point, Glasgow Prestwick served as Scotland's only transatlantic base, the training site for Concorde pilots (due to its geography making fog cover minimal) and the only place Elvis Presley visited in the whole of the UK.

However, Glasgow Prestwick as it looks today really began life in the 1990s, with the construction of its own train station and the introduction of the first low-cost airline – a Ryanair service to Dublin. Since then, low cost airlines have come to dominate the airport, allowing it to welcome in excess of two million passengers a year.

Travelling to Glasgow Prestwick Airport

Though it boasts serving Scotland's second city, the airport is located 29 miles away from Glasgow.

As such, passengers travelling there need to head to the much nearer town of Prestwick, though this is easily done, particularly as it is the only airport in Scotland to benefit from its own railway station. From here, there are direct services to Glasgow, Ayr, Kilmarnock and Newcastle in the north-east of England.

For those passengers with their own cars, the airport can be reached via the A79, which allows for easy access to most of Scotland and the north of England.

Major airlines flying out of Glasgow Prestwick Airport

The low-cost carrier Ryanair dominates services out of Glasgow Prestwick, an airport it has made one of its major UK maintenance hubs. The airline operates routes to 20 destinations across the UK and Europe, including Belfast, Barcelona, Faro, Las Palmas, Cork, Derry, Dublin, Girona, Grenoble, Frankfurt, Krakow, London Stansted, Milan, Murcia, Oslo, Shannon, Stockholm, Tenerife and Wroclaw.

In comparison, its Central European rival Wizz Air flys to just four cities, namely Gdansk, Katowice, Poznan and Warsaw.

During the summer months, these services are supplemented by flights to Dalaman, operated by Freebird Airlines, as well as to Alicante, Arrecife, Barcelona, Faro, Las Palmas, Palma de Mallorca and Tenerife South by Futura and LTE on behalf of a travel firm.