A WORLD BEFORE MANCHESTER AIRPORT
MANCHESTER’S aviation history actually begins with a newspaper competition.
On April 28, 1910, Louis Paulhan landed his Farman biplane in a field in Burnage to win the £10,000 Daily Mail prize for becoming the first person to fly from London to Manchester.
His daring deed set in motion a sequence of events that would lead to the creation of Manchester Airport as we know it today.
Soon after, three airfields sprung up across the region.
One alongside Ashburton Road in Trafford Park was privately-owned and stayed open until 1918.
Another was a temporary aerodrome next to the National Aircraft Factory in Heaton Chapel, and a third was a temporary strip by aircraft manufacturer Avro’s works in Miles Platting.
They closed with the end of the First World War, coinciding with plummeting aircraft production.
But in 1918 the War Department opened an airfield at Hough End Fields – later Alexandra Park – which was used for testing military aircraft. On May 1, 1919, the first ever transport flight landed here.
Three years later, Daimler Airways began the first international service, flying from Manchester to Amsterdam.
But after being extended to Berlin, it was stopped in early 1924 and use of the Alexandra Park runways petered out.