page_title: Gimpo International Airport
section_title: History
hierarchical_section_title: Gimpo International Airport / History
caption_attribution_description: I think these planes that I saw at Kimpo (the Seoul airport) in the fall of 1945 are Japanese. (Mitsubishi Ki.51 Type 99 attack planes that carried the Allied code name "Sonia" per comment)
context_page_description: Gimpo International Airport, commonly known as Gimpo Airport, is located in the far western end of Seoul, some 15 km west of the Central District of Seoul. Gimpo was the main international airport for Seoul and South Korea before being replaced by Incheon International Airport in 2001. It now functions as Seoul's secondary airport. In 2015, 23,163,778 passengers used the airport, making it the third largest airport in Korea, as it has been surpassed by Jeju International Airport.
  The airport is located south of the Han River in western Seoul. The name "Gimpo" comes from the nearby city of Gimpo, of which the airport used to be a part.
  On 29 November 2003, scheduled services between Gimpo and Haneda Airport in Tokyo, Japan resumed. Services to Shanghai Hongqiao International Airport resumed on 28 October 2007. Services to Kansai International Airport in Osaka, Japan started on 26 October 2008. Services to Beijing Capital International Airport started on 1 July 2011. Services to Taipei Songshan Airport started on 30 April 2012.
context_section_description: The airfield was originally constructed in 1935–1942 during the Japanese Imperial period as an Imperial Army base. The runways were built on a bed of rocks manually hauled by Korean laborers from Kaihwasan and Yangchan, several miles from the base. Then known as Keijo New Airfield (京城新飛行場), Kimpo was constructed with four runways to supplement the much smaller Keijo Airfield (京城飛行場), which was later known as Yeouido Airport.
caption: Mitsubishi Ki-51s at Kimpo in October 1945
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