| Scotland's only airport with a rail link.
Glasgow Prestwick International Airport is located 29 miles south of Glasgow in North Ayrshire in close proximity to the Ayr Bay. It is connected to Glasgow Queens Station via a 30 minute rail link, conveniently placed only 50 meters away from the main terminal.
Prestwick is not the most beautiful of airport: the main reason for this is that it received its last major facelift in the mid sixties, but what it does not deliver in beauty, it certainly delivers in convenience, as checking in is normally pretty quick and there are no endless terminals to cross.
The airport was founded in 1934 and gained importance during WWII as the delivery stop for american planes part of the lend lease programme, and according to the lore, up to 300 planes a day from the US would be landing in Prestwick, just to be dispatched onwards.
After WWII, the airport was designated to be the only intercontinental scottish airfield, due to Prestwick's excellent weather conditions. In 1964 two new huge runways and the existing terminal was built, to accomodate the growing interest in intercontinental flights. Unfortunately this waned with the building of Glasgow International Airport, which is located closer to Glasgow. From the mid-eighties to the late nineties, business was pretty drab apart from the odd charterflight, but in 1998 the saviour of every regional airport came to pull Prestwick International from total anonymity: Ryanair started daily feeder flights to Stansted and soon expanded their scottish operations, declaring Prestwick their scottish Hub. Other low cost airlines like BMI Baby, Germania Express, Globespan, Arran Air followed: these days, 3 million passengers fly yearly to Europe and the U.S., mostly for quite attractive prices.
A good reason to forget the horrible interior.
http://www.gpia.co.uk | 
