Zagreb Airport

About Zagreb Airport

Zagreb is a cradle of the aviation in this part of Europe. As early as 1909 the town had its own airfield. The first successful flights were undertaken by engineer Penkala, a Croatian inventor. On June 23, 1909 he flew the first Croatian two-seat aircraft. S. Penkala was the first in the world to invent a ball-point pen and a fountain pen. He invented a total of 70 patents.

After the end of the First World War the aviation was slowly gaining its importance. A real spectacle had happened in 1927 when Charles Lindbergh landed at Zagreb Airport in Borongaj, after his successful flight over the Atlantic. The first airplane on a regular domestic flight landed on Borongaj runway on February 15, 1928. The first regular domestic flight called at Lucko airport on April 1, 1947 and the first international flights started the same year.

Zagreb Airport opened on its present location on April 20, 1960. It had a 2.500 m long concrete runway, a parallel taxiway, a passenger terminal on the area of 1.000 sqm, an apron for 5 small aircraft and several smaller service buildings.

In 1966 a new passenger terminal of 5.000 sqm was built, the apron was extended to 60.000 sqm and modern administrative airport headquarters were built along with control tower for the needs of Regional Air Traffic Control as well as a whole range of other buildings and service facilities. In the following years the air transport over Zagreb Airport grew dynamically. New equipment was introduced to operate the existing volume of traffic. New airport maintenance buildings was errected - a new technical base and a technical warehouse, cargo loaders, mobile baggage loading equipment, etc.

In 1974 Zagreb Airport was reconstructed. The runway was extended to 3.250 m, the equipment and the radio-navigational units were modernized. Within the frame of the reconstruction a part of passenger terminal was enlarged, the aircraft taxiway was extended and new commercial facilities were opened.

During these years Zagreb was linked to 20 of the largest European cities. A large number of tourists from the European contries and from other continents were landing at Zagreb Airport and continuing their journey to the Adriatic Sea, the Plitvice Lakes, continental part of Croatia and to other attractive regions. The peek of the traffic was reached in 1979 when Zagreb Airport handled 1.917.197 passengers, 15.168 t of cargo with 37.424 aircraft movements.

After almost two years of continuous work, we can declare that Zagreb Airport finally has a defined long-term development plan, so called Master Plan, up to year 2030. Such plan has become inevitable, since traffic transport grows very fast and Croatia as a young country wants to have its safe position in the European traffic net.

Services at Zagreb Airport