As Birmingham International Airport celebrates its 75th birthday today, a very impressive milestone, we’d like congratulate our colleagues for their success and take a look back at our long friendship.
We’ve been flying from Birmingham International Airport since we were founded, back in 1968 – some 46 years! In the mid-90s, we based an aircraft there to service our chartered operations.
In 2005, we launched our expansion into scheduled operations, announcing our intention to become a market leader in the Midlands with a massive 30% increase in capacity. In late April of that year, we commenced operations with daily flights from Birmingham to both Malaga and Tenerife.
In our first year of operating scheduled flights we carried over 188,000 customers to their holiday destinations. By contrast in 2012, we carried 630,000 people to holiday destinations from Birmingham International Airport, more than tripling our customer numbers in seven years.
Continuing the Monarch Group’s long commitment to the airport, in 2013, our sister company Monarch Aircraft Engineering opened a state-of-the-art maintenance facility at Birmingham. The 110,000 sq ft hangar immediately created 150 new jobs and also has the capability to create 150 more.
To date, Monarch has cumulatively flown over 5.5 million customers to holiday destinations across the Mediterranean, the Canaries and North Africa from Birmingham International Airport. We now fly customers to a total of 26 destinations, with the recent introduction of flights to Salzburg and Turin – as part of our winter ski programme for 2014/15.
We would like to wish Birmingham International Airport many happy returns on its 75th birthday!
We’d love to hear your happy memories of flights from Birmingham over the years – why not share them in the comments below?