Keflavik International Airport
Facts on KEF
The US military built two separate two-runway airfields just 4 km apart during the wartime occupation of Iceland: Patterson Field opened in 1942 and Meeks Field on 23 March 1943. Patterson closed after the war; Meeks is the airport still in use today.
Source: Wikipedia
Keflavík means "Driftwood Bay". The town on the Reykjanes peninsula was founded by Scottish entrepreneurs and engineers in the 16th century and grew on fishing and fish processing; in the 1960s and 1970s it produced so many bands that Icelanders called it bítlabærinn, "The Beatle Town".
Source: Wikipedia
The airfield was not named for the town at first. The Americans who built it in the war named it Meeks Field, after George Meeks, a young pilot who died at the Reykjavík airfield. When the site was handed back to Iceland after the war it was renamed for Keflavík, the town next door.
Source: Wikipedia
Until 1987 civilian passengers had to pass through US military checkpoints to reach their flights, because the 1949 terminal sat inside Naval Air Station Keflavik. Iceland finished a separate civilian terminal on the north side in April 1987; the old one was demolished in 2018.
Source: Wikipedia
The base was deeply unpopular. Through the 1960s and 1970s protesters walked the 50 km road from Reykjavík to Keflavík each year chanting "Ísland úr NATO, herinn burt" — Iceland out of NATO, the military away. The US finally closed the naval air station in 2006.
Source: Wikipedia
Keflavík's two runways are each about 3,050 m (10,000 ft) long and 60 m (200 ft) wide — enough to take NASA's Space Shuttle or an Antonov An-225. Sitting mid-Atlantic, it is a key diversion field for ETOPS twin-engine crossings.
Source: Wikipedia
Icelandair and Loftleiðir only moved here in the 1960s, when the Canadair CL-44 and Iceland's first jet, a Boeing 727, proved too big for the short runway at downtown Reykjavík Airport. By the 1970s almost all international traffic had shifted the 50 km out to Keflavík.
Source: Wikipedia
Keflavík handles every scheduled international flight to and from a country of about 400,000 people, and served 8,159,461 passengers in 2025 — 2,236,530 of them simply transferring between flights and never leaving the building.
Source: Wikipedia
Iceland's domestic flights do not use Keflavík at all — they run from Reykjavík Airport, three kilometres from the city centre, while Keflavík sits 50 km southwest. Since 2022 even Icelandair's Greenland services have moved to Keflavík so they can connect onward.
Source: Wikipedia