Islamabad International Airport
Facts on ISB
Despite the name, the airport is not in Islamabad. It stands near Fateh Jang in Attock District, 25 kilometres southwest of the capital, and is roughly equidistant from Zero Point in Islamabad and Saddar in Rawalpindi.
Source: Wikipedia
Islamabad means 'city of Islam' — the Arabic islam, 'submission to God', plus the Persian suffix -abad, 'cultivated place'. A history by Muhammad Ismail Zabeeh credits the teacher and poet Qazi Abdur Rehman Amritsari with proposing the name.
Source: Wikipedia
The capital the airport serves is younger than the jet age. A 1958 commission went looking for a replacement for coastal Karachi, the site northeast of Rawalpindi was recommended in 1959, the Greek architect Constantinos Doxiadis laid out a triangular grid pointing at the Margalla Hills, and Islamabad was established in 1967.
Source: Wikipedia
It replaced Benazir Bhutto International Airport — the old Chaklala airfield in Rawalpindi, renamed in June 2008 for the prime minister assassinated the previous December. Its last scheduled departure was Pakistan International Airlines flight PK791 to Birmingham.
Source: Wikipedia
Benazir Bhutto, who gave the old airport its name, was prime minister of Pakistan from 1988 to 1990 and again from 1993 to 1996 — the first woman elected to head a democratic government in a Muslim-majority country. She was assassinated after a rally in Rawalpindi on 27 December 2007.
Source: Wikipedia
President Pervez Musharraf and Prime Minister Shaukat Aziz laid the foundation stone on 7 April 2007. The airport was meant to take five years; it took twelve, and cost about three times the original estimate. Prime Minister Shahid Khaqan Abbasi inaugurated it on 1 May 2018.
Source: Wikipedia
France's Aéroports de Paris Ingénierie and Singapore's CPG Corporation designed the airport. It covers more than 3,200 acres and has two runways, four taxiways and a 180,000-square-metre modular terminal built for nine million passengers and 80,000 tonnes of cargo a year.
Source: Wikipedia
It was the first airport in Pakistan built with double airbridges capable of handling an Airbus A380, and on 8 July 2018 an Emirates A380 arrived from Dubai as flight EK-2524 — the first time the type had ever landed in Pakistan.
Source: Wikipedia
Pakistan International Airlines moved its international hub here from Karachi in 2023, saying it better reflected where its international passengers came from. In the 2024–25 fiscal year Islamabad overtook Karachi's Jinnah International to become the country's busiest airport by total passengers.
Source: Wikipedia