Adelaide International Airport
Facts on ADL
The current site at West Beach was chosen in January 1946, construction began in 1947, and regular airline services started on 16 February 1955. The first passenger terminal was simply an annexe bolted onto one of the airport's large hangars.
Source: Wikipedia
Adelaide takes its name from Adelaide of Saxe-Meiningen (1792-1849), a princess of a tiny liberal German duchy who married William, Duke of Clarence, at Kew Palace in 1818 and was Queen of the United Kingdom from 1830 to 1837. None of her children survived infancy.
Source: Wikipedia
The city was founded in 1836 as the planned capital of a freely settled British colony and named in honour of the reigning queen consort. Colonel William Light picked the site near the River Torrens and laid out the grid of wide boulevards and squares ringed by parkland.
Source: Wikipedia
Adelaide had no international terminal until November 1982. The first international arrival was a Qantas Boeing 747-200B from London via Singapore, and Singapore Airlines and British Airways became the first foreign carriers to serve the city.
Source: Wikipedia
Parked in a climate-controlled museum on airport land is the Vickers Vimy that Adelaide brothers Ross and Keith Smith, with mechanics Jim Bennett and Wally Shiers, flew from England to Darwin by 10 December 1919 to claim a £10,000 government prize.
Source: Wikipedia
Adelaide trialled a world-first way to cool its runways: planting crops irrigated with recycled water. SA Water found lucerne worked best, cutting average ambient air temperatures near the irrigated areas by about 3 °C on warm days, and its thick growth also discouraged birds.
Source: Wikipedia
The airport occupies 785 hectares (1,940 acres) roughly 6 km west of the city centre, handles an average of more than 250 flights and 25,000 passengers a day, and carried over 9.1 million passengers in FY26 as Australia's fifth-busiest airport.
Source: Wikipedia
The combined domestic and international terminal opened on 8 October 2005, replacing two cramped separate buildings that between them had two aircraft bays and one jetbridge. It offers 42 common-user check-in desks, and was the first Australian airport with terminal-wide free Wi-Fi.
Source: Wikipedia
A new control tower 44 metres (144 ft) tall, more than twice the height of the 1983 tower it replaced, was commissioned in August 2013 at a cost of A$16.9 million. The old tower was kept for additional operations.
Source: Wikipedia