UK2000 Scenery has recently released their rendition of Birmingham Airport (EGBB) for Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020 and 2024. The airport serves the West Midlands in the United Kingdom and has a yearly average of 12.8 million passengers, making it the seventh busiest in the Country.

The idea for an airport in Birmingham was first conceived in 1928, and a committee was created shortly after to research possible locations to start building. After much deliberation, Elmdon was deemed the best of the bunch, but the project soon went back to the drawing board due to the Great Depression. It wasn’t until 1933 that works resumed, with a new committee formed to oversee its construction.

Before taking any steps, though, the newly formed committee went on a research trip to multiple successful airports in Europe, such as Schiphol (Amsterdam), Berlin (Tempelhof), Paris (Orly), Brussels, and London. 

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By January 1935, they had finally approached a company—Norman and Dawbarn—to advise on the construction and help design the airport as lead architects. Groundwork started in 1936, after the government allowed the airport’s development.

A year later, in 1937, Norman and Dawbarn were authorized to begin drawing the airport’s project, the undertaking of which took 6 months to reach completion. It was not until October 1937 that the construction of the airport’s buildings would start, costing around 360,000 pounds.

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Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain opened the airport in July 1939 as Elmdon Airport. The terminal featured a modern (for late 30s standards) art deco design with an integrated control tower and was the airport’s main terminal until 1984. 

The airport was requisitioned by the Air Ministry to be used by both the Royal Air Force and the Royal Navy as RAF Elmdon during World War 2. The military “occupation” replaced the original grass runways with two hard runways, 753 meters in length and 1,271 meters in length, respectively. 

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It was used as a testbed for Avro Lancasters and Stirling bombers manufactured in northeast Worcestershire. These bombers were transported via land to Elmdon because their local airport didn’t have a long enough runway.

On July 8, 1946, the airport, which was celebrating its 7th anniversary, was reopened for civilian use, albeit still government-controlled.

Scheduled services started in 1949 with British European Airways, flying passengers to Paris. Over the years, the airline eventually expanded its network to Zürich, Düsseldorf, Palma, Amsterdam, and Barcelona.

In the early 1960s, they built a new terminal to handle international traffic and extended the main runway to 2.2 km, allowing the airport to handle larger turboprop aircraft and jetliners.

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By the beginning of the 1970s, Birmingham Airport was already reaching a million passengers per year, significantly congesting their subpar terminal infrastructure.

In the 1980s, BHX became home to the world’s first commercial maglev system, a train levitated by magnets. This system ran for nearly 10 years but eventually faced discontinuation due to unreliability. It was replaced by a cable-hauled system in 2003.

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In late 2007, the airport’s administration devised a development plan for Birmingham called “Towards 2030: Planning a Sustainable Future for Air Transport in the Midlands.” The plan included changes to the terminals, alterations to the airfield layout, and infrastructure improvements. Unexpectedly, environmentalists and locals complained, as they didn’t want the construction of a second parallel runway. 

The original plan—now canceled—could have created up to 250,000 jobs in the area, made the airport handle up to 70 million passengers annually, and led to around 500,000 aircraft movements in total.

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In 2008, the shorter runway (06/24) was decommissioned due to its length and noise impact. Instead, it became a taxiway, allowing the expansion of the apron. 

Construction work on the new 3-storey International Pier kicked off in June of that same year, taking a bit more than a year to complete. Now, Birmingham Airport was fully compatible with the Airbus A380, which visited the airport during its 70th birthday. It was the first commercial service of the A380 in the United Kingdom that was not bound to London Heathrow.

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In 2010, it was announced that they would merge Terminal 1 and 2 into a single building and change the name from Birmingham International Airport to Birmingham Airport. They figured this could help create a new corporate identity that would better reflect their current position in the market and attract more people to fly from it. Research showed that while 8 million people lived within an hour of the airport, only 40% of them used it. 

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A new control tower was built in 2011, ultimately replacing the original one built in 1939.

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The plans for extending the main runway, originally submitted in 2008, were approved a year later, but the work was only completed in 2014, two years after their original target, which was the 2012 London Olympics. 

In late 2016, 100 million pounds were invested in building a new baggage handling system and two new car parks.

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It’s an operating base for easyJet, Jet2, Ryanair, and TUI Airways, and served by Aer Lingus, Air France, Air India, Aurigny, Brussels Airlines, Corendon Airlines, Emirates, Eurowings, KLM, Loganair, Lufthansa, Pegasus Airlines, Qatar Airways, Saudia, Scandinavian Airlines, SunExpress, Swiss International Air Lines, Turkish Airlines, Vueling, and WizzAir.

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The scenery features an accurate rendition of the airport, with full detail buildings, custom ground markings, custom night lighting, PBR textures, animated jetways, performance-friendly optimization, and more.

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It’s available on SimMarket for roughly $12.81, requiring at least 87.86 MB of free hard disk space to install.

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