Sheremetyevo International Airport
Facts on SVO
The site began as a Soviet military airfield called Sheremetyevsky, built under a Council of Ministers decree issued 1 September 1953 near the settlement of Chashnikovo. It became operational on 7 November 1957, timed to mark the 40th anniversary of the October Revolution.
Source: Wikipedia
Alexander Pushkin, honoured in the airport's full name, is widely regarded as Russia's greatest poet and the founder of modern Russian literature. His verse novel Eugene Onegin and play Boris Godunov made him a literary icon before he died in 1837 from wounds suffered in a duel over his wife's honour.
Source: Wikipedia
Sheremetyevo was originally named after a nearby village and railway station, not a person. Pushkin's name was added only after the 'Great Names of Russia' public contest concluded in December 2018; the airport was formally renamed at a ceremony on 5 June 2019, the 220th anniversary of Pushkin's birth.
Source: Wikipedia
Civilian flights began on 11 August 1959, and the first international service followed on 1 June 1960 to Berlin Schönefeld aboard an Ilyushin Il-18. By the end of 1964 the airport was handling 822,000 passengers and 23,000 tons of mail and cargo a year.
Source: Wikipedia
The original Sheremetyevo-1 terminal, opened in 1964, had a flying-saucer-shaped design that earned it the local nickname 'shot glass'. It was 200 metres long, 40 metres wide, and could process up to 800 passengers an hour before being demolished in 2015 for a larger replacement.
Source: Wikipedia
Sheremetyevo-2 (now Terminal F) was rushed into service on 1 January 1980 for the Summer Olympics that year, sized to handle 6 million passengers annually; during the Games it processed more than 460,000 international passengers.
Source: Wikipedia
By 2019 the airport handled about 49.9 million passengers, having overtaken rival Domodedovo as Russia's busiest airport in 2015 (31.28 million versus 30.05 million). It remains the busiest airport in Russia and the post-Soviet states.
Source: Wikipedia
Sheremetyevo was the designated official airport of the 2018 FIFA World Cup, and it later became an early adopter of a digital-twin model to plan and forecast operations, which the airport says saved more than 1 billion rubles while making it a world leader in on-time performance.
Source: Wikipedia