26-30 Airport Facts
26. The Kansai Airport in Osaka, Japan, is an artificial island. Due to the numerous earthquakes, the island has begun to sink, and so engineers have created hydraulic devices to lift the island above the water. – Source
27. A 2012 Study found that 12,000 laptops are lost in airports every week. –Source
28. Once or twice a week, employees at the Israeli airport collect lost balloons from the arrivals hall and take them to children’s hospitals around the country. – Source
29. Paris airport of Orly uses software called DECOR, which is employed in takeoffs and landings and runs on Windows 3.1, an operating system that was released in 1992. The airport only has three specialists who are familiar with DECOR. An upgrade has been scheduled for sometime between 2017-2021. – Source
30. Runways have to be longer at higher altitudes. The worlds longest runway is 18,045 feet long, located at a tiny airport in Tibet. – Source
31-35 Airport Facts
31. Bratislava Airport is within an hour’s drive of Vienna (Austria), Brno (Czech Republic), Győr (Hungary), and of course Bratislava (Slovakia), making it the only airport to serve four countries. – Source
32. British Taxpayers paid £285M ($364,000,000 dollars) for an airport in the remote island of Saint Helena which opened in 2016. Only one commercial aircraft landed, and the airport was subsequently deemed useless. – Source
33. When Georgia’s Savanah Airport attempted to expand a runway in the 1980’s they were not given permission from a family to relocate two graves that lay on the property. The airport paved over the graves and laid two headstones flat with the runway. – Source
34. A Spanish airport that cost €1,000,000,000 to be built in 2008 was sold for €10,000 in 2015. – Source
35. Toronto’s Pearson International Airport uses trained birds of prey to scare away, kill, or eat other birds in order to reduce the risk of bird strikes. Among these are falcons, hawks, and a bald eagle named Ivan. – Source
36-38 Airport Facts
36. Montreal built the world’s then biggest airport in the 70s, and it is now almost entirely abandoned. – Source
37. Portland Airport’s (PDX) CARPET is so beloved, residents have created merchandise, a craft beer, and even tattoos based on the design. – Source
38. Much of airport security measures are theater and provide little if any security benefits. – Source
