Bandaranaike International Colombo Airport
Facts on CMB
The site started in 1944 as RAF Negombo, a Royal Air Force wartime airfield. Work on a civil international airport began in 1964 with Canadian aid and finished in 1967; Air Ceylon flew from it with a Trident and a VC-10 leased from BOAC.
Source: Wikipedia
The airport is named for S. W. R. D. Bandaranaike (1899-1959), who founded the Sri Lanka Freedom Party and won a landslide in 1956 to become Ceylon's fourth prime minister. Known as the Silver Bell of Asia for his oratory, he was shot at his Colombo house and died on 26 September 1959.
Source: Wikipedia
His father, the Maha Mudaliyar of Ceylon, named him after Sir Joseph West Ridgeway, the British governor of the day, who was his godfather. He read philosophy, politics and economics at Christ Church, Oxford, and was junior treasurer of the Oxford Union.
Source: Wikipedia
For all the Colombo name and the CMB code, the airport is at Katunayake in the suburb of Negombo, 32.5 km north of the capital. The Colombo-Katunayake Expressway covers the distance in about twenty minutes.
Source: Wikipedia
Everything runs off a single runway, 04/22, offering 3,441 m for take-off and 3,350 m for landing. In the early 1990s the runway was shifted northward and the old one was turned into a taxiway for arriving and departing aircraft.
Source: Wikipedia
The first Boeing 747 to land here arrived on 7 November 1971, a Condor 747-200B bringing German tourists from Frankfurt. The first Airbus A380 took another four decades: an Emirates aircraft on 9 January 2012.
Source: Wikipedia
Traffic peaked in 2018 at 10,798,669 passengers, slid after the 2019 Easter bombings and fell to 2,023,941 in 2020. The airport connects to 52 airports in 28 countries, with Dubai, Male and Chennai the busiest routes.
Source: Wikipedia
Terminal 1, built in 1967, is still the main international building: twelve gates strung along one long arm-shaped concourse. A second terminal begun in 2020 stalled in 2022 when Sri Lanka's economic crisis hit, leaving Terminal 1 badly overcrowded.
Source: Wikipedia