Glasgow Airport

The Air Ministry opens a site at Abbotsinch between the Black Cart and White Cart Waters near Paisley; No. 602 Squadron RAuxAF later flies from it and it becomes RAF Station Abbotsinch, then the Royal Navy air station HMS Sanderling from 1943.

Commercial operations begin on 2 May 1966 with a British European Airways flight from Edinburgh; Queen Elizabeth II formally opens the new terminal, designed by Basil Spence, on 27 June at a cost of £4.2 million.

Ownership passes to the British Airports Authority (BAA), which runs Glasgow as part of its UK airports group for the following decades.

BAA begins a large redevelopment of the terminal, adding an extended building, a new international departure lounge and taking gate capacity to 38, part of a push that also made Glasgow one of the first UK airports to screen all passenger baggage in the early 1990s.

On 30 June 2007 a Jeep Cherokee loaded with propane canisters is driven into the entrance of the main terminal and set alight; terminal doors and quick-thinking staff and bystanders prevent the vehicle from breaching the building, and there are no fatalities among the public.

Heathrow Airport Holdings sells Glasgow, along with Aberdeen and Southampton, to a consortium of Ferrovial and Macquarie Group (operating as AGS Airports) for around £1 billion.

Emirates operates the first Airbus A380 service to any Scottish airport on 10 April 2014, and the airport opens a dedicated lounge for the carrier that July.

The airport handles 8.06 million passengers, a 9.6% increase on the prior year, keeping it Scotland's second-busiest airport and around the ninth-busiest in the UK.