Inside Sofia Airport - Sofia, Bulgaria
Posted by: 
Metro2
N 42° 41.331 E 023° 24.921
34T E 697866 N 4729091
This airport handles nearly 4 million passengers yearly.
Waymark Code: WMPQNJ
Location: Bulgaria
Date Posted: 10/08/2015
Views: 9
Spent some time here waiting for my flight to Munich. A few gift shops, a few food and beverage stops, There was a student art installation when I visited in October 2015.
Wikipedia (
visit link) adds:
"Sofia Airport (IATA: SOF, ICAO: LBSF) ... Letishte Sofiya), sometimes also called Sofia-Vrazhdebna Airport (Bulgarian: ?????? ?????-?????????, Letishte Sofiya-Vrazhdebna), is the main airport of Bulgaria. The airport is located 5 km (3.1 mi) east from the centre of Sofia. In 2014 the airport handled 3,815,158 passengers, a 8.9% increase compared to 3,504,326 handled in 2013. Also in Sofia Airport is located the Vrazhdebna Air Base of the Bulgarian Air Force...
The airport was initially built in the late 1930s on a site 6.3 km (3.9 mi) (7.5 km (4.7 mi) by road then; later 9 km (5.6 mi) by road and today 10.2 km (6.3 mi) and up to 11.4 km (7.1 mi)) distant from the geographical centre of Sofia as a replacement of that city's small civil airport at Bozhurishte. The airport was used as hub by domestic airline Bunavad which connected Sofia to Burgas, Plovdiv, Ruse and Varna. In 1938, Yugoslav airline Aeroput begin regular direct flights linking Sofia to Belgrade three times a week using Lockheed Model 10 Electra planes.[3] The airport served Sofia which then had under 250,000 inhabitants and continues to serve the city nowadays, which had about 1.2 million by 2011.
During the Second World War, the facilities were used by the military. Mail, perishable freight and passenger operations began in 1947 from buildings on the north side of the airport. The passenger terminal (now Terminal 1) on the south side was completed during the Second World War in the manner of a then-modern European railway terminus to designs by the architect Ivan Marangozov. It opened after several years of delay in 1947. The structure comprised a government wing to the west, an international handling area in the middle, and a domestic handling area to the east. At that time, it was planned that the airport would eventually have two intersecting runways at a 30-degree angle to each other."