Glasgow Airport

Glasgow Airport is the principal international gateway to western Scotland and historically the busiest airport in Scotland — in recent years overtaken by Edinburgh (EDI) — located in Paisley, Renfrewshire, 8 mi (13 km) west of central Glasgow. GLA handles 127 routes to 78 destinations operated by 21 airlines. The airport serves a catchment of roughly 2.9 million people across the Glasgow metropolitan area and onward into Ayrshire, Argyll, the Highlands, and the Hebrides, and functions as Scotland's dominant airport for trans-Atlantic service, leisure charter traffic, and operations requiring the UK's second-longest Scottish runway. Glasgow also played a pivotal role in the 1970s–1990s shuttle networks of British Airways and British Midland, and the airport retains a strong business-travel base. No full hub operation currently exists at GLA; the airline mix is a competitive focus-city pattern. Ryanair, easyJet, Jet2.com, TUI Airways, British Airways (CityFlyer and London shuttle), Loganair (a historically Glasgow-important carrier operating regional services across the Scottish isles), KLM, Air France, Lufthansa, Emirates (daily A380 to Dubai), Qatar Airways (daily to Doha), United Airlines (New York Newark and seasonal), and a significant contingent of European and Mediterranean charter carriers operate. The Emirates A380 service is a particularly notable indicator of the airport's international significance — GLA is one of only a handful of UK airports outside London with daily superjumbo service. Transatlantic service includes seasonal routes to Orlando, New York, Toronto, Halifax, and Reykjavík. The airfield sits at 26 ft (8 m) elevation with a single 8,730 ft (2,661 m) asphalt runway, 05/23, adequate for full-payload 777 and A330/A350 operations (the Emirates A380 is one of the largest aircraft regularly operating the runway). The primary terminal with its T1 and T2 concourses handles all operations under one roof after a multi-year consolidation that eliminated the separate T2 building. Glasgow was the site of the 1 July 2007 vehicle-bomb terror attack, a major security event in UK aviation history that prompted enduring landside-security revisions. The airport is owned and operated by AGS Airports.