Interkontinental 1940-1972

World War II

On 9 April 1940, the war caught up with Copenhagen Airport. Almost all civil air traffic was halted, military squadrons were deployed and camouflage netting transformed the new airport terminal into the only hill in the area.

The airport remained untouched by actual acts of war; during the war years there was quite a bit of civil air traffic to Sweden, Berlin, Vienna and a couple of other destinations.

In the spring of 1941, a combination of huge masses of snow and a sudden thaw caused aircraft to bog down in the grass runways of the airport. As a result, the first concrete runway was laid that summer; it was 1,400 metres long and 65 metres wide.

In subsequent years, another three runways and a system of taxiways were constructed.

Since at the same time the terminal had barely been used, when WWII ended in May 1945, Copenhagen Airport was the most modern – and unscathed – international airport in Europe.

A European hub

The airport went intercontinental in 1946. Both American Overseas Airlines and the newly founded SAS began operating scheduled flights to the US. In 1948, the airport was the third largest in Europe, with more than 150 daily take-offs and landings and almost 300,000 passengers.

The airport continued its rapid growth. The terminal was expanded several times and new hangars were erected. In 1954, the Los Angeles city limit moved to Copenhagen with the opening of the first polar flights to Copenhagen. The number of passengers climbed to 700,000 – which required new automatic baggage handling facilities.

Aviation was now a necessity for businesspeople, and airmail was increasingly important to international trade; in 1954, 11,000 tonnes of cargo and mail were handled by the airport.

The jet age

In the 1950s, the motto was "larger, better and faster": jet planes were on the way. In 1956, the airport served one million passengers, and a comprehensive expansion programme was launched to make Copenhagen Airport the world’s most modern jet airport. The runways were lengthened and fitted with technically advanced equipment. A new giant terminal with a system of piers was erected some distance from the "old" terminal. The first jet plane, which was Russian, landed in 1957, and both SAS and its foreign rivals acquired jet planes with increasing speed. The propeller aircraft phased out by the scheduled airlines formed the basis for a completely new type of airline: the charter companies that flew tens of thousands of Scandinavians to southern Europe each year.

By 10 May 1960, when the new airport terminal (now Terminal 2) was inaugurated, the daily number of jet operations had increased to 28, and still traffic kept on growing. The large new airport terminal soon became too small, and in 1969 yet another huge expansion programme was launched.

Domestic traffic was relocated to a new domestic terminal (the eastern part of Terminal 1). The (current) international terminal was supplemented with a new pier (C) and a separate arrivals hall (the building between Terminals 2 and 3). A new control tower and 3,600 metres of additional runways allowed take-offs and landings to take place at the same time.

When the comprehensive expansion was completed in 1972, the number of take-offs and landings exceeded 180,000 and there were more than eight million passengers.