EMA plans its 60th anniversary and asks – how will aviation look in another 60 years?
East Midlands Airport is set to mark its 60th anniversary next year with a programme of events celebrating its progress as a holiday gateway and growth into the UK’s number one air freight hub.
The diamond anniversary celebrations will focus around the key dates of April 2 and July 21 – the dates in 1965 when the airport respectively began commercial operations and was officially opened by HRH the Duke of Edinburgh.
During the Second World War the site was RAF Castle Donington, the centre for training for the Pathfinder Force. In the 1950s the county councils of Leicestershire, Derbyshire and Nottinghamshire developed plans to finance and run a new airport which it was decided should be located close to where the M1 motorway was scheduled to be built - with the former RAF site offering the perfect location.
In its first year of operation as a commercial airport there were only 114,888 passengers and no cargo planes – 60 years later, after terminal and runway expansions, a new air traffic control tower and many developments in aviation, more than 4m passengers fly through EMA every year and its cargo operation contributes £1.6bn national GVA and supports more than 17,000 jobs across the UK.
Events are being planned to mark the 60th anniversary, with details to follow in due course. Launching this week is a competition among local schoolchildren to imagine what air travel might be like by 2085. Around 500 schools in the areas surrounding EMA are being invited to take part by submitting ideas as drawings, graphic designs, videos, poems or short stories. All entries will need to be submitted and received by the airport by Friday 14 February 2025 and will be displayed in the terminal during the Easter holidays.
EMA’s Managing Director Steve Griffiths said: “It’s a big year for us at EMA next year, marking 60 years since getting off the ground as a commercial airport. We have come a long way in that time, now offering effortless travel to more than four million people a year and playing a pivotal role in delivering seamless trade between the UK and the rest of the world.
“We’ve got lots of plans in the pipeline for marking this special occasion, and the first to be announced is a competition to get local schoolchildren to imagine how planes and air travel might change in the next six decades.
“A great deal has certainly changed since 1965 which undoubtedly the people who developed EMA could not have foreseen, so it will be interesting to see where youngsters’ imaginations take them.”