Timeline of Gatwick Airport

Origins

• 1241: First record of the name "Gatwick". Gatwick was a manor in the parish of Charlwood, a village in Surrey. Gatwick manor house was on the site of today's airport, on the northern edge of the North Terminal's aircraft taxiing area; until the 19th century, it was owned by the De Gatwick family. Its name derives from the Old English gāt and wīc ; i.e. "goat farm".
• 12 July 1841: The London and Brighton Railway opened, and ran near Gatwick Manor.
• 1890: The descendants of the original owners sold the area to the newly established Gatwick Race Course Company.
• 1891: The new owners opened a racecourse adjacent to the London-Brighton railway, to replace a racecourse in Croydon, and a dedicated station included sidings for horse boxes, and named Gatwick Racecourse Station. The course hosted steeplechases and flat races. During its time as a racecourse, many days were cancelled due to fog, fog would later continue to cause problems for the airport including the fatal crash involving Turkish Prime Minister's plane in 1959.
• 1907: Gatwick Golf Club was founded.
• 1916, 1917, 1918: The Grand National was run at Gatwick during the First World War. The Gatwick Golf Club disappeared following the end of the First World War.

  1920–1945

• Late 1920s: Land adjacent to the racecourse was used as an aerodrome. The Hunts Green farmhouse on the land used for the aerodrome was converted into a clubhouse and terminal.
• November 1928: From then, Dominion Aircraft Limited based its Avro 504 G-AACX at Gatwick.
• 1 August 1930: Ronald Waters, manager of Home Counties Aircraft Service, who had come into possession of Gatwick Aerodrome, got a licence for it. He founded the Surrey Aero Club there.
• 2–3 August 1930: Flying began with pleasure flights for the local population in Avro 504s of Waters's Surrey Aero Club.
• 1932: The Redwing Aircraft Company bought the aerodrome, and operated a flying school; it was also used for pilots flying in for races.
• 1933: The Air Ministry approved commercial flights from Gatwick.
• September 1933: A. M. Jackaman, who owned several light aircraft, bought the aerodrome for £13,500. He had bold ideas for its future, such as expanding it to make it suitable to use as a relief aerodrome for London Airport and providing a regular service to Paris using de Havilland DH.84 Dragon aircraft. He overcame resistance from the Air Ministry, which was concerned about the cost of draining the clayey land and diverting the River Mole.
• 1934: Jackaman oversaw Gatwick's transition to a public aerodrome, licensed for non-private flights, and planned a proper terminal building linked to a new railway station on the adjacent Brighton Main Line. He formed a new airport company, Airports Limited. Hillman's Airways became Gatwick's first commercial airline operator, beginning scheduled services from the airport to Belfast and Paris.
• January 1935: Hillman's Airways moved to Gatwick from Stapleford Aerodrome.
• 1935: A new airline, Allied British Airways, was formed with the merger of Hillman's Airways, United Airways and Spartan Air Lines. The new carrier, which later shortened its name to British Airways, became Gatwick's principal operator. Dorking and Horley Rural District Council was concerned about possible compensation claims from local residents and the threat of facing liability for flying accidents, and it "could see no benefit" to allowing further development of the aerodrome.

• 6 July 1935: The aerodrome closed temporarily for renovations, which included building the "Beehive", the world's first circular terminal building.
• September 1935: Tinsley Green station opened on time, served by two trains per hour on the Victoria-Brighton line.
• 30 September 1935: Tinsley Green station opened south of the present Gatwick station.
• October 1935: The contracted opening date, but it was not met, partly because of drainage problems.
• 17 May 1936: The first scheduled flight departed from the Beehive terminal at 1:30 pm, bound for Paris Le Bourget. Jersey Airways operated this flight with a DH.86 under contract to British Airways Ltd., whose livery the aircraft wore. The airfare was £4 5s, and there were up to three flights a day. Later the same day, British Airways Ltd. introduced another new scheduled service from Gatwick to Malmö, which routed via Amsterdam, Hamburg and Copenhagen. Total travelling time between Gatwick and Malmö was six-and-a-half hours.
• 25 May 1936: British Airways Ltd. and Southern Railway jointly launched scheduled air services between Gatwick and the Isle of Wight.
• 1 June 1936: Tinsley Green station was renamed "Gatwick Airport".
• 6 June 1936: The airport was officially reopened by the Secretary of State for Air, Lord Swinton. It featured four grass landing strips which were linked to the terminal area by two concrete taxiways, one each for arriving and departing aircraft respectively. The Beehive, the new terminal, was officially opened the same day. The Beehive was designed by Frank Hoar and incorporated several novel features, including a subway to the railway station at Tinsley Green which allowed passengers to travel from Victoria Station to the aircraft without stepping outside. Air Travel Ltd moved into the new airport's No. 1 hangar.
• July 1936: British Airways Ltd. inaugurated regular night mail flights linking Gatwick with Cologne and Hanover.
• September and November 1936: Two fatal accidents happened, raising questions about the airport's safety. The area was foggy, and its clay soil drained poorly; this caused the new subway to flood after rain.
• 17 February 1937: Gatwick was declared unserviceable due to waterlogging following repeated, heavy rainfalls. Because of this tendency to flood, and because longer landing strips were needed, the pre-war British Airways moved to Croydon Airport. Gatwick returned to private flying, and was used as a Royal Air Force flying school.
• October 1937: The No. 19 Elementary and Reserve Flying Training School RAF began instructing future RAF pilots at Gatwick on de Havilland Tiger Moth and Hawker Hart biplanes.
• 1938: Airwork General Trading Co. moved into the hangar British Airways Ltd. had occupied at Gatwick. This enabled Heston-based Airwork to expand its aircraft manufacturing capacity on behalf of the Civilian Repair Organisation, which had awarded it a contract to modify Whitley bombers for the RAF. Southern Aircraft Ltd. was another company working under contract to the CRO at Gatwick at the time. It had been licensed to assemble Stinson Reliants and Beechcraft Expeditors for the Royal Navy and also repaired damaged Beaufighters.
• 25 June 1938: The first Daily Express Air Display was held at Gatwick. Aircraft participating in the flypast included a Short Empire flying boat, a Lufthansa Focke-Wulf Condor, a Sabena Savoia-Marchetti SM.83, several RAF types and aerobatic aircraft.
• 1 September 1939: No. 19 E&RFTS ended its activities at Gatwick.
• 3 September 1939: Following the declaration of war on Germany, all civilian flying at Gatwick and elsewhere in the UK stopped. As a consequence, civil aircraft maintenance and manufacturing activities at the airport stopped as well. This resulted in the airport being requisitioned by the Air Ministry, and becoming a base for RAF night-fighters and an Army co-operation squadron during World War II.
• December 1939: The operations manager of British Airways Ltd., which had begun the process of merging with Imperial Airways to form British Overseas Airways Corporation, inspected Gatwick to assess its suitability as a base for the combined operations of the merged airline.
• 1940: BOAC maintenance personnel began overhauling Armstrong Whitworth Ensigns and other aircraft types at Gatwick. Horse racing at Gatwick ended and never restarted.
• 1940 and 1941: RAF units relocated to Gatwick from France. The airport became closely associated with the RAF Army Cooperation Command. As a result, several Army Cooperation Command aircraft were stationed at Gatwick. These included Westland Lysanders, Curtiss Tomahawks and North American Mustangs.
• Late 1942: Gatwick began receiving RAF and USAAF bombers that were damaged or running short of fuel. The most common types were Avro Lancasters, Handley Page Halifaxes, Short Stirlings and Boeing B-17 Flying Fortresses.
• January 1945: Gatwick was taken over by the Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force Disarmament Unit. As a result, it received a large number of transport and communications aircraft.

1945–1958

• 1946: The airport was officially decommissioned on 31 August, but the Ministry of Transport and Civil Aviation continued operating it as a civil airfield. Airwork provided maintenance at Gatwick and other charter airlines, flying war-surplus aircraft, began using the airport despite its persistent drainage problem. Most commercial air services were cargo flights. Bond Air Services was one of the first cargo charter airlines to move to Gatwick; it began flying converted Halifax bombers from the airport.
• November 1946: Customs facilities began being provided at Gatwick.
• March 1947: Luton-based Hunting Air Transport established a base at Gatwick. It became the airport's first operator of post-World War II British-designed aircraft following delivery of a de Havilland Dove and two Vickers Vikings.
• January 1948: Airwork converted war-surplus Douglas Dakota aircraft for civil use at Gatwick, with work being carried out on up to 35 aircraft simultaneously. This included all British European Airways aircraft, as well as many BOAC, Aer Lingus and KLM aircraft.
• 1948: The second Daily Express Air Display at Gatwick drew a crowd of 70,000. It included an RAF flypast and flying displays by a British South American Airways Avro Tudor and a KLM Douglas DC-6.
• November 1948: The airport's owners warned that it might revert to private use by November 1949; Stansted was favoured as London's second airport, and Gatwick's future was unclear.
• 1949: The third and final Daily Express Air Display was held at Gatwick.
• 1950: Despite local opposition, the Cabinet chose Gatwick as an alternative to Heathrow. BEA launched a seasonal scheduled service to Alderney in the Channel Islands, which operated for three consecutive summer seasons until 1952. At the time, there were three operational runways. These were aligned South-West–North-East, East–West and South-East–North-West. The first was long, wide and covered in steel mesh; the second was long, wide and covered in steel mesh as well; the third was of the same length and width as the second but was grass-covered.
• May 1950: Gatwick's first charter flight left the airport's original grass runway for Calvi on Corsica. Jersey-based UK independent airline Air Transport Charter operated this flight under contract to UK package tour pioneer Vladimir Raitz's Horizon Holidays with a 32-seat Douglas DC-3 carrying 11 passengers.
• September 1951: BEA's Experimental Helicopter Unit moved to Gatwick from Peterborough.
• 1952: BEA established a base at Gatwick for its helicopter operations. Silver City Airways introduced Gatwick's first car ferry flights. These were seasonal, operating in the summer twice a day between Gatwick and Le Touquet. They were flown with Bristol 170 Mk 31 Freighters, which were replaced with larger Mk 32 Superfreighters from April 1955.
• July 1952: The British government confirmed that the airport would be renovated to provide sufficient capacity for an expected doubling of aircraft movements in the London area by 1960 and for aircraft diverted from Heathrow in bad weather.
• 1953: Jersey Airlines began flying from Gatwick to Alderney. The airline's first scheduled service from the airport was flown with de Havilland DH.114 Heron aircraft.
• 17 January 1956: The Gatwick Airport Consultative Committee held its first meeting.
• 1956 to 1958: The airport was closed for the £7.8 million renovation; during that period, BEA continued using Gatwick for its helicopter operations. The renovations were performed by Alfred McAlpine; they entailed diverting the A23 London–Brighton trunk road and the River Mole, building a runway across the former racecourse and rebuilding the former racecourse railway station next to the new terminal. The new, concrete runway was the first in Britain to feature high-speed turn-offs on to a parallel taxiway. The masterplan for the new airport also provided for subsequent construction of second runway, as part of a second phase, northward extension of the airfield.