•The saddest-ever unclaimed item at Dublin Airport's lost-property office was a tombstone bearingthe words ‘You will always be remembered, never forgotten.’ •There are over 41,700 airports in the world, almost one-third of them in the USA. • Passengers at Hong Kong international Airport can de-stress at the nine-hole golf course next to Terminal 2. • King Fahd International Airport in Dammam, Saudi Arabia, takes up 192,000 acres — more than the entire country of Bahrain. •The world's shortest commercial airport runway is on the Dutch Caribbean island of Saba. It's only 15,744 inches long. • The world's oldest airport is College Park, Maryland, founded by Wilbur Wright in 1909. • The world's prettiest airport is said to be Compton Abbas airfield in Dorset, now owned by film director Guy Ritchie. In 1993, disgraced tycoon Asil Nadir escaped from there. • In 2017, a Lucky Air flight was grounded at Anqing airport in China and a 76-year-old woman passenger arrested after she threw coins into the plane's engine for luck. • The average number of connections needed to get from any one airport in the world to another is four. • Davos, host town to the annual World Economic Forum, has no airport. The nearest one is almost 50 miles away. • Gibraltar International Airport's only runway is bisected by the colony's busiest road, Winston Churchill Avenue. The road has to be closed every time a plane takes off. •At 6,500 feet, Paro's runway is shorter than its own height above sea level (7,300 feet). It's so dangerous only eight pilots are qualified to land there. • Pilots once identified airports using US National Weather Service two-letter shortcodes for cities. When three-letter codes came in, some cities simply added an X — hence LAX for LA. • The airport shortcodes for Nutuve, Papua New Guinea; Funafuti, Tuvalu; Boset, Papua New Guinea; and Butler, Missouri are respectively NUT, FUN, BOT and BUM. • The international airport at Georgetown, Guyana, used to be called Ogle. • Ulaanbaatar International Airport is named after Genghis Khan.
