London Luton Airport

Luton Airport opened in July 1938 as Luton Municipal Airport, built and owned by the town council on the edge of the quiet Bedfordshire countryside. It was taken over for full wartime use almost right away. Percival Aircraft built small trainer planes on the site during the war. Afterward the airfield slowly went back to civil flying for local passengers.

Its big break came in the 1960s and 1970s during Britain's package holiday boom, when many ordinary Britons began flying abroad for cheap sunshine trips for the first time. Charter airlines, including Britannia Airways and Monarch Airlines, founded at Luton in 1968, made it one of Britain's busiest holiday airports. A second transformation arrived in 1995, when easyJet launched from Luton with leased Boeing 737s flying to Glasgow and Edinburgh.

That launch made Luton the birthplace of British low cost flying, meaning cheap, no frills service. Ryanair, Wizz Air, and TUI followed, and Wizz Air's British arm made Luton its main base. The council owns the airport but leases it to private operators, a group headed by the Spanish company Aena. A cable hauled people mover called the DART opened in 2023, linking the terminal to the train station quickly.

Luton runs a single runway, 07/25, just over 2,100 meters, short by London standards. It sits on a plateau above the town, with a noticeable slope and a steep drop past its western end. One terminal handles all traffic.

The airport is unapologetically low cost, with Wizz Air, easyJet, Ryanair, and TUI running a schedule tilted toward Central and Eastern Europe, Mediterranean beaches, and winter ski trips. Luton is also one of Europe's leading airports for private jets, with a large business aviation apron out of proportion to its size.