Manchester Airport

Manchester Airport (IATA: MAN, ICAO: EGCC) is an international airport in Ringway, Manchester, England, 7.5 nautical miles (13.9 km; 8.6 mi) south west of Manchester city centre. In 2015, it was the third busiest airport in the United Kingdom in terms of passenger numbers. Manchester Airport has flights to around 225 destinations, three terminals, a goods terminal and two runways, each over 3,281 yd (3,000 m) in length. The airport covers an area of 1,440 acres (580 ha).

Officially opened on 25 June 1938, it was initially known as Ringway Airport. In World War II, as RAF Ringway, it was a base for the Royal Air Force. The airport is owned and managed by the Manchester Airports Group (MAG), a holding company owned by the Australian finance house IFM Investors and the ten metropolitan borough councils of Greater Manchester, with Manchester City Council owning the largest stake.

Manchester is the largest airport outside of the South East and handles more international flights than other regional airports in the UK. The airport regularly handled the supersonic Concorde and houses the British Airways G-BOAC flagship Concorde at the Manchester Runway Visitor Park. Ringway, after which the airport was named, is a village with a few buildings and church at the southern edge of the airport. The airport handled 23.1 million passengers in 2015 and has capacity for up to 50 million passengers annually. This potential figure is limited by the airport's restriction to 61 aircraft movements per hour. Future developments include the £800 million Manchester Airport City logistics, manufacturing, office and hotel space next to the airport, and transport improvements such as the SEMMMS relief road and a High Speed 2 station.

Manchester

Coordinates: 53°28′N 2°14′W / 53.467°N 2.233°W / 53.467; -2.233

Manchester (/ˈmæntʃɪstər/) is a city and metropolitan borough in Greater Manchester, England, with a population of 514,417 as of 2013. It lies within the United Kingdom's second-most populous urban area, with a population of 2.55 million. Manchester is fringed by the Cheshire Plain to the south, the Pennines to the north and east and an arc of towns with which it forms a continuous conurbation. The local authority is Manchester City Council.

The recorded history of Manchester began with the civilian settlement associated with the Roman fort of Mamucium or Mancunium, which was established in about 79 AD on a sandstone bluff near the confluence of the rivers Medlock and Irwell. It was historically a part of Lancashire, although areas of Cheshire south of the River Mersey were incorporated during the 20th century. Throughout the Middle Ages Manchester remained a manorial township but began to expand "at an astonishing rate" around the turn of the 19th century. Manchester's unplanned urbanisation was brought on by a boom in textile manufacture during the Industrial Revolution, and resulted in it becoming the world's first industrialised city.

Qatar Airways

Qatar Airways Company Q.C.S.C. (Arabic: القطرية‎, Al Qatariyah), operating as Qatar Airways, is the state-owned flag carrier of Qatar. Headquartered in the Qatar Airways Tower in Doha, the airline operates a hub-and-spoke network, linking over 140 international destinations across Africa, Central Asia, Europe, Far East, South Asia, Middle East, North America, South America and Oceania from its base at Hamad International Airport, using a fleet of more than 150 aircraft.

Qatar Airways Group employs more than 31,000 people, of which 19,000 work directly for Qatar Airways. The carrier has been a member of the Oneworld alliance since October 2013 (2013-10), the first Gulf carrier to sign with one of the three airline alliances.

History

Qatar Airways was established on 22 November 1993 (1993-11-22); operations started on 20 January 1994 (1994-01-20).Amman was first served in May 1994 (1994-05). At April 1995 (1995-04), the airline's CEO was the Sheikh Hamad Bin Ali Bin Jabor Al Thani who employed 75. By this time the fleet consisted of two Airbus A310s that served a route network including Abu Dhabi, Bangkok, Cairo, Dubai, Khartoum, Kuwait, London, Madras, Manila, Muscat, Osaka, Sharjah, Taipei, Tokyo and Trivandrum. During 1995, two ex-All Nippon Airways Boeing 747s were bought from Boeing. The airline acquired a second-hand Boeing 747SP from Air Mauritius in 1996 (1996).

Airport

An airport is an aerodrome with facilities for flights to take off and land. Airports often have facilities to store and maintain aircraft, and a control tower. An airport consists of a landing area, which comprises an aerially accessible open space including at least one operationally active surface such as a runway for a plane to take off or a helipad, and often includes adjacent utility buildings such as control towers, hangars and terminals. Larger airports may have fixed base operator services, airport aprons, air traffic control centres, passenger facilities such as restaurants and lounges, and emergency services.

An airport with a helipad for rotorcraft but no runway is called a heliport. An airport for use by seaplanes and amphibious aircraft is called a seaplane base. Such a base typically includes a stretch of open water for takeoffs and landings, and seaplane docks for tying-up.

An international airport has additional facilities for customs and immigration.

In warfare, airports can become the focus of intense fighting, for example the Battle of Tripoli Airport or the Battle for Donetsk Airport, both taking place in 2014. An airport primarily for military use is called an airbase or air station.

Fighter aircraft

A fighter aircraft is a military aircraft designed primarily for air-to-air combat against other aircraft, as opposed to bombers and attack aircraft, whose main mission is to attack ground targets. The hallmarks of a fighter are its speed, maneuverability, and small size relative to other combat aircraft.

Many fighters have secondary ground-attack capabilities, and some are designed as dual-purpose fighter-bombers; often aircraft that do not fulfill the standard definition are called fighters. This may be for political or national security reasons, for advertising purposes, or other reasons.

A fighter's main purpose is to establish air superiority over a battlefield. Since World War I, achieving and maintaining air superiority has been considered essential for victory in conventional warfare. The success or failure of a belligerent's efforts to gain air supremacy hinges on several factors including the skill of its pilots, the tactical soundness of its doctrine for deploying its fighters, and the numbers and performance of those fighters. Because of the importance of air superiority, since the dawn of aerial combat armed forces have constantly competed to develop technologically superior fighters and to deploy these fighters in greater numbers, and fielding a viable fighter fleet consumes a substantial proportion of the defense budgets of modern armed forces.