Air-traffic control tower - Santander Airport

Back to Santander Airport to fly back to Birmingham.

We left out hotel in Bilbao before 6am local time, and got there after 7am, for the 9:30am flight.

The airport is quite small and it named after Seve Ballesteros, the former golfer.

Was raining as we came in to land.

Santander Airport

Santander Airport (IATA: SDR, ICAO: LEXJ), officially Seve Ballesteros–Santander Airport, is an international airport near Santander, Spain and the only airport in Cantabria. In 2018 the airport handled 1,103,353 passengers and 11,258 flights, far more than in 1995 when it handled only 180,000 passengers. Since then, the traffic has declined following the trend in Spanish airports and the decrease in operations by some of the companies.

The current airport, built on ground reclaimed from the Bay of Santander, was opened to traffic in 1977. A smaller airfield was built on the location between 1947 and 1952 by prisoners of the Spanish Civil War. It opened in 1953, replacing the old Santander airport located in La Albericia, which received commercial flights since 1949, and received the name of Aeropuerto de Santander and popularly known as "Parayas". It received the international rating in 1957.

After a three-year closure (from April 1974 until 8 August 1977), in which the airport underwent a major renovation that significantly expanded its facilities and had a cost of more than 1,100 million pesetas of the time; it was reopened with a new 2,400 m runway and with the technology to allow both visual and instrumental flight; the first flight after the renovation corresponded to the Iberia's DC-9 "Ciudad de Santander", that covered the Barcelona-Santander-Santiago de Compostela route.

In recent years there have been new renovation works, that started in 2007, remodeling and expanding the terminal and installing two gateways or fingers for direct access to the planes, widening the platform for parking more aircraft or construction of taxiways and a platform for general aviation.

Until 2003, the premises were considered underused due to the limited number of flights and their high fees, which made a shift in potential passengers to the airport of Bilbao, 100 km away. From this date, following an agreement signed between the Government of Cantabria and the budget airline Ryanair, the airport experimented an increase in the number of destinations (national and international), passengers and airlines operating. In 2005, the airport reached 644,662 passengers, growing by 88% over the previous year and having a user balance between domestic and international flights. This increase was the largest proportion of all airports in Spain in that year.

In December 2010, 37.8 million euro was invested for the upgrading of the facilities, preparing the airport to handle an annual traffic of over two million passengers a year. The works included the remodelling of the terminal building of 10,200 square meters, expanding new areas of departures and arrivals as well as the construction of a taxiway that can handle 22 movements per hour, and the extension of the aircraft parking platform.

Air-traffic control tower

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Taken in: Spain / Cantabria / Camargo / Maliaño (show map)

Taken on: June 28, 2024

Tags:

Ryanair

Santander

Santander Airport

SDR

Seve Ballesteros–Santander Airport

Aeropuerto Seve Ballesteros - Santander

Cantabria

Cantabrian Sea

coach

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Camera: Canon PowerShot SX70 HS, f/5.6, 1/50 sec, 33.5mm, ISO 800 (more info) (hide info)

Camera:	Canon PowerShot SX70 HS
Lens:	3.8-247.0 mm
Aperture:	f/5.6
Exposure Time:	0.02 sec (1/50)
Focal Length:	33.5mm
ISO:	800
Exposure Bias:	0 EV
Flash:	No Flash
Exposure Program:	Program AE
Exposure Mode:	Auto
Metering Mode:	Multi-segment
White Balance:	Auto
Color Space:	sRGB
Software:	Adobe Photoshop Elements 18.0 (Windows)
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