A flashmob of classical music performed by the Youth Orchestra of the Alicante Province (OJPA) has surprised tourists and travelers who were this morning at the Airport of Alicante-Elche, who have met with this improvised spectacle in the terminal .

The initiative is part of the campaign “50 years with you”, which is developing the Alicante terminal to celebrate the 50th anniversary of its founding in 1967.

Young musicians have interpreted a fragment of the work Liberators, the natural composer Novelda (Alicante ) Óscar Navarro, winner of the Hollywood Music in Media Awards and nominated for the Goya for the movie “Sueños de Sal” (2016).

Hidden as normal passengers, the first to make his appearance was a child with a few drums, who slowly has joined the rest of his colleagues to form a real in live orchestra.

Finally, the performance has concluded with the deployment of a canvas with the logo of the 50th anniversary and the label that accompanies it: # ALC50años.

The terminal commemorates the first commercial flight of the Aviaco company, which arrived at El Altet on May 4, 1967

That first trip had a journey time of 90 minutes, twice as much as today.

 

The Alicante-Elche airport now celebrates its first 50 years consolidated as fifth of Spain and 14 of Europe in traffic and being an “engine” of employment with 6,000 people who work directly inside the terminal. It marks the 50th anniversary of the first landing of an airplane from Madrid on May 4, 1967.

Since then the airport has undergone two major transformations to become one of the most modern terminals in Spain with the capacity to move 20 million passengers a year but with a large pending subject, the lack of rail connection with Elche, Alicante and Benidorm, city to which 50% of the passengers who start their holidays on the Costa Blanca arrive.

The airport has been key to the tourist development of the province since the early 1970s. Until the inauguration of the charter terminal (1972), tourists arriving from London landed in Valencia and from there they arrived in Benidorm by bus.

Fifty years have passed since the then Air Minister, José Lacalle, and Bishop Pablo Barranchina, gave a welcome today, civil and ecclesiastical, to the first commercial flight of the history of the airport in El Altet (until then Alicante used the military base of Rabasa). A Corvier Metropolitan airplane belonging to the Aviaco company arrived from Madrid on May 4, 1967, when 80,677 passengers were transported through the aerodrome and 3,764 aircraft were moved. The flight lasted 90 minutes, double what it takes today a modern reactor to cover the 500 kilometers that separates El Altet from Barajas.

Fifty years later, Aena’s forecast is for the airport to exceed this year 2017 13 million passengers and about 90,000 aircraft. Today Thursday by the terminal will pass 47,430 passengers in 277 aircraft heading for Great Britain, Russia, Germany, Belgium, Norway. And also Madrid, where 50 years ago took off the now-defunct Corvier Metropolitan who landed in El Altet on a party morning in Alicante and with Pilar Leal La Viña, the first passenger of the airport. Curiously, the first flight was also on a Thursday. On April 1, 1968, the Alicante-Madrid and Alicante-Barcelona regular lines would begin.

The airport that opened in 1967 would be completed with a charter terminal in 1972 and with several buildings until in 1996 the first major expansion would be undertaken with the construction of a second terminal now used for general aviation and private flights. After this, in 2007 would start the construction of what since the spring of 2011, six years ago, is a new airport.

The architect and designer of the current terminal was Bruce Fairbanks, who along with his team, developed the entire work based on two concepts: bioclimatic architecture and functionality. The total investment of the expansion plan developed between 2004 and 2011 amounts to 570 million euros, of which 384 million were invested in the terminal.

The airport has since a billing room with an area of ​​15,500 m2. In addition, 148 check-in counters, 42 boarding gates, 21 catwalks and 25 luggage collection tapes. Four thousand two hundred parking spaces and an area reserved for the arrival of TRAM and / or the railway, the great subject pending.

Before the current airport, Alicante had the Rabasa air base, which had been created for military purposes during the Civil War. The base had been used by commercial aviation in an irregular way and with many difficulties due to a series of unfavorable conditions (very nearby houses, difficult accesses).

From Rabasa to El Altet

Rabasa’s facilities were rendered obsolete due to the impossibility of landing large aircraft and the potential for traffic from the tourist boom. A plain was chosen near the Ilicitan nuclei of El Altet and Torrellano, that is to say, in the same place where the first field of civilian flights that was in Spain, owned by the French company Lignes Aeriennes Latécoére, was located. This company used it as a stopover of its mails with Dakar (Senegal) at the beginning of century XX. From the year 1927 its use was carried out by the company Aeropostale, precursor of Air France.

The airport opened in 1967 and soon ceased to be run by the military. Since then he has had five directors. Francisco García Hortal, Jaime Santa Pau, Mariano Menor and Santiago Martínez-Cava, who on June 1 will give the Tomas Melgar, who comes from Menorca.