Ben Gurion International Airport
Facts on TLV
Ben Gurion Airport's code TLV honors Tel Aviv, but the airport actually sits near the city of Lod. It was known as Lydda Airport and then Lod Airport for decades before being renamed in 1973 for Israel's first prime minister, David Ben-Gurion.
Source: Wikipedia
The airport is named for David Ben-Gurion, born David Grün in Russian Poland in 1886, who immigrated to Ottoman Palestine in 1906 and became the preeminent leader of its Jewish community. On 14 May 1948 he proclaimed the State of Israel's founding and was the first to sign its Declaration of Independence, then served as its first prime minister.
Source: Wikipedia
Despite being a frequent target of terrorist plots over the decades, no attempt to hijack a plane departing Ben Gurion Airport has ever succeeded.
Source: Wikipedia
On 30 May 1972, three Japanese Red Army gunmen opened fire with machine guns in the airport's arrival hall, killing 24 people and wounding 80 in what became known as the Lod Airport massacre. The lone surviving gunman, Kozo Okamoto, was released in 1985 in a prisoner exchange with the PFLP-GC.
Source: Wikipedia
On 8 May 1972, four Black September militants hijacked a Sabena flight from Vienna and forced it to land at the airport. Sayeret Matkal commandos led by Ehud Barak, and including a young Benjamin Netanyahu — both future Israeli prime ministers — stormed the plane and killed two of the hijackers.
Source: Wikipedia
Terminal 3, the airport's main building since 2004, was designed by the American firm Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, with Moshe Safdie & Associates designing the airside departure areas. The project, known internally as Natbag 2000, ran over budget to an estimated one billion US dollars before opening on 28 October 2004.
Source: Wikipedia
In 2025 Ben Gurion Airport handled 19.2 million passengers. Its Terminal 3 has 40 gates split across four concourses plus two bus-boarding stands, and its upper-level departures hall covers more than 10,000 square metres with 110 check-in counters.
Source: Wikipedia
The longest nonstop flight ever to leave Ben Gurion was a private Airbus A340-500 belonging to casino magnate Sheldon Adelson, which departed on 2 January 2017 for Honolulu via a polar route over the Arctic Ocean — a flight projected to take 17 hours and 40 minutes.
Source: Wikipedia
The airport began in 1934 as a two-runway airstrip near the town of Lydda, and in 1946 it hosted aviation's first civilian transatlantic route when TWA began flying nonstop between New York City and Lydda Airport.
Source: Wikipedia