IT HAS had to battle against both bureaucracy and meteorology but Cork airport has overcome both during the past half century to become a multimillion passenger airport.
The airport's success story is told in a new history, Fifty Years Have Flown, by brothers Donal and Diarmuid Ó Drisceoil.
The book chronicles not just the development of the airport on a hillside at Farmers Cross near Ballygarvan just south of Cork in the late 1950s, but also the preceding years of aviation in Leeside.
Beginning their story with the launch of an unmanned balloon in Cork in 1784, the two historians provide an interesting insight into aviation matters, including the daring Lord Carbery who gave one of the first exhibitions of flying in Cork in early July 1914.
Among the fascinating early photographs is one of a US naval air service seaplane being launched on a specially built slipway in Aghada in east Cork before the book moves on to chart the controversy about where the new airport should be built.
“We looked at the whole controversy about that, but we could find no evidence of any political corruption, as has often been claimed – it came down to a decision between Ballygarvan, which was too high, and Ahenesk near Midleton, which was too low,” said Donal.
“It was ultimately a technical decision on the basis that Ballygarvan was closer to the city and that ultimately proved correct when the technology emerged to deal with the issue of fog, even though in the 1960s, it meant the airport had higher than average diversion rates.”
Cork airport’s problem with fog, succinctly captured in poet Bernard O’Donoghue’s line “where the lights fought a losing battle with the fog”, was finally overcome in 1989 when new technology made it possible for aircraft to land in foggy weather.
The book also recalls the importance of the pilgrimage businesses in the early years as well as how the airport has been touched by tragedy – the Tuskar Rock crash of 1968, the 1985 Air India tragedy and the Manx2 crash this year when six people died.
Published by the Collins Press, the book is lavishly illustrated with photographs ranging from bishop of Cork and Ross Dr Cornelius Lucey blessing the airport on its opening on October 16th, 1961, to the arrival of pop stars such as Paul McCartney and the Bee Gees.