page_title: Glasgow Prestwick Airport
section_title: 1990s
hierarchical_section_title: Glasgow Prestwick Airport / History / 1990s
caption_attribution_description: Italiano: Area partenze del Glasgow Prestwick Airport.
context_page_description: Glasgow Prestwick Airport is an international airport serving the west of Scotland, situated one nautical mile northeast of the town of Prestwick in South Ayrshire and 32 miles from Glasgow. It is the less busy of the two airports serving the area, the busier one being Glasgow Airport, which is within the Greater Glasgow conurbation itself, in the town of Paisley in Renfrewshire.
  Glasgow Prestwick is Scotland's fifth-busiest airport in terms of passenger traffic, after Edinburgh, Glasgow, Aberdeen and Inverness, although it is the largest in terms of land area. Passenger traffic peaked at 2.4 million in 2007 following a decade of rapid growth, driven in part by the boom in low-cost carriers, particularly Ryanair, which uses the airport as an operating base. In recent years, passenger traffic has declined; around 670,000 passengers passed through the airport in 2016.
context_section_description: 1992 marked the beginning of a renaissance for the struggling airport when purchased by "Canadian entrepreneur" Matthew Hudson in a "dramatic rescue". Hudson initiated the construction of the airport's railway station on the existing Ayrshire Coast Line (Glasgow–Ayr), which runs past the airfield, making it the first Scottish airport with its own railway station. In her book about Prestwick Airport, South Ayrshire councillor Ann Galbraith writes about this tough time in the airport's history, saying that "if it hadn't been for Matthew Hudson the airport wouldn't be here today". 
  In 1994, Irish budget airline Ryanair opened a route to the airport from Dublin, followed by a second route in 1995 to London Stansted. In 1998, a third route to Paris-Beauvais was introduced and the airport was sold by Hudson to the Scottish transport company Stagecoach Group.
caption: Check-in area at Prestwick Airport
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