Flights to Ireland
In one of our last posts we told you about the way to get to Ireland by ferry. Today we decided to tell about flights to Ireland as it’s the main way of visiting the country.
First we should note the high quality of the air transport in Ireland because of many airports in the country. You can judge this yourselves. On the small island of Ireland there are four international and 7 regional airports. Mass media even discussed superabundance of airports in Ireland a couple of years ago.
Anyway, all regional airports are still working and beside inner flights people can use them to get to Ireland from the territory of Great Britain. So, you can arrive to the airport of Donegal from Scottish Glasgow, to Knock from Birmingham, Bristol, London and Manchester.
You can get Galway from Birmingham, Bristol, Cardiff, Edinburgh, Leeds-Bradford, Manchester and South Hampton. Even small regional airports, such as Kerry, Waterford and Derry can receive aircrafts from Great Britain.
The main flight traffic to Ireland goes through Dublin airport which is one of the most crowded airports of Europe where every day almost 80 thousand passengers are serviced while the annual turnover counts to 22 million people. Only the recent activation of the second terminal of the airport allowed to discharge the over traffic of the capital airport.
It’s no use to list all of more than the 150 directions of flights to Ireland and that is why we shall only note modern transatlantic flights, mainly from the USA, which became possible only due to the first pioneers of such flights. We spoke about them in our post “The Famous Portmanock”.
So aircrafts from Boston, Chicago, Los-Angeles, New York, Philadelphia and Newark arrive to Dublin and Shannon and from Newark to Belfast. By the way, in the late 20th century the Shannon airport was an important transhipment base for planes from the Eastern Europe including the USSR, and it is in this airport, for the first time ever, the free trade system, “Duty Free” started to work.