"Dublin Airport: An Irishman's Diary"

Monday, November 1, 2004

An Irishman's Diary
Ireland - The Irish Times


Dublin Airport's original terminal building was once a place of elegance and
practicality for people using the airport. Air travel then was vastly
different from what it is today; budget class air fares and airlines just
didn't exist.

The whole story of  had begun back in 1937, when the government bought 100
acres of land at Cloghran in north Co Dublin for the proposed new airport at
Collinstown. The runway was built over the next couple of years and work got
under way on the design of the terminal building. It was the first
significant new building in the modern Ireland.

The man entrusted with the design was Desmond FitzGerald, who headed a team
of architects on the project at the Office of Public Works. He came up with
an immensely stylish Art Deco design based on the bridge of a luxury
ocean-going liner, just as that type of travel was just starting to go out
of fashion. It was an age of elegant airline travel; the terminal at Le
Bourget airport in Paris, opened shortly before, had been designed in
similar style.

The new Washington Airport in the US had equally splendid lines.

He had a younger brother to help him with plenty of advice, Garret, then a
teenager, who later revealed how reluctant the powers that be were to
sanction a full-scale airport terminal. They thought that a couple of rooms
would be sufficient and there was little expectation that there would ever
be enough traffic to justify the construction.

But work went ahead and the terminal was eventually completed in early 1942.
Features included a verandah viewing point, an aero club lounge, banking
facilities and loudspeakers for passenger information, announcing arrivals
and departures. FitzGerald also designed covered walkways from the terminal
building to the aircraft, but these weren't implemented for another 20
years.

The design of the four-storey building with the control tower perched on
top, avant-garde in so many ways, was the pinnacle of Desmond FitzGerald's
career. Today, the building is still regarded as a classic, a rare Art
Deco-style building in Ireland. Aviation experts of the time said that
Dublin Airport was one of the finest in the world.

The very first Aer Lingus flight from the new airport took off on January
19th , 1940 and since the second World War was well under way at that stage,
traffic at the new airport was almost non-existent for the next five years.
One flight a day was usual and two a day was considered busy. Often, sheep
were let graze on the runway.

The new airport terminal didn't come to life until the war ended and it took
until 1946 for coverage of the new building to begin in the national
newspapers. Local people promptly christened it the "White Elephant".

The setting was still very rural and unspoiled and at harvest time,
passengers in the terminal could see workers with horse-drawn carts bringing
in the hay that had been saved from the airport grounds, close to the
terminal.

Slowly, the momentum was stepped up. Aer Lingus started increasing its
services and people grew accustomed to air travel. The first service to
mainland Europe, by KLM to Amsterdam, began in 1947. Flights were slow by
today's standards; Lourdes in a DC3 took five hours.

Air travel was also very expensive and only the better off could afford it,
so the passengers then were very different from the complete cross-section
of people one sees today. In those far-off days, a complement of passengers
for a flight resembled a fashion plate from a glossy society magazine.
Travel was very elitist and people thought nothing of bringing 30 or 40
kilos of luggage with them. But the whole place was so different that for
many Dubliners, a trip out to the airport was an exciting day out.

The old terminal had a great "institution" , the restaurant run by Johnny
Oppermann, which had clear views out over the airfield. The head chef was
Jimmy Flahive, who made a great name for himself in the early days of
TelefIs Eireann. Dinner at the airport was mandatory for many gourmets and
the gala events, like New Year's Eve, became legendary.

This restaurant had been included by Desmond FitzGerald in his original
design, complete with room for an orchestra and space for dancing. By
today's standards the prices were incredibly modest. A 1962 menu shows steak
priced at 10 shillings and a bottle of Beaujolais for 14 shillings, but at
the time, those prices were way beyond the means of ordinary working people.

On the ground floor, with its large foyer, people using the check-in desks
were signed in for their flights and their baggage weighed all in a matter
of minutes. Arriving on a flight, collecting luggage and going through
customs were equally fast.

The glory days for the old terminal were really in the 1960s, culminating in
the arrival of John F. Kennedy, the then president of the US, in June, 1963.
The arrival of the Beatles that same year created almost as much excitement
at the airport, but when US President Nixon arrived seven years later, it
was a complete let-down.

However, by the mid- 1960s, the terminal was already beginning to creak at
the seams with the numbers of passengers, so planning began for a new one.

This very utilitarian terminal was opened in 1972, with the expectation of
handling five million passengers a year. Today, with numbers heading towards
20 million, that terminal, much expanded, is still in use.

The old terminal was decommissioned and turned into offices by the
organisation then responsible, the old Aer Rianta company. These days, the
original terminal is almost lost amid the surrounding buildings and it's
hard to imagine the impact it had in its early days.

It's equally hard not to become a little nostalgic for those earlier days of
flying, slower, elegant, devoid of any hassle and not a security check in
sight.


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