Early years The airport was constructed in 1927, opening to domestic and international air traffic on 22 April 1931, although regular commercial operations began two years later. A small terminal was constructed with a capacity for 30,000 passengers a year, in addition to several hangars and the building of the Avión Club. The first regular flight was established by
Lineas Aéreas Postales Españolas (LAPE) with its route to
Barcelona. In the 1930s, flights started to serve some European and African destinations, the first international flights from the airport. Originally, the flight field was a large circle bordered in white with the name of Madrid in its interior, unpaved, consisting of land covered with natural grass. It was not until the 1940s that the flight field was paved and new runways were designed. The first runway which started operation in 1944 was long and wide. By the end of the decade the airport had three runways, none of which exist today. In the late 1940s, scheduled flights to Latin America and the
Philippines started. In the 1950s, the airport supported over half a million passengers, increasing to five runways and scheduled flights to
New York City began. The National Terminal, currently T2, began construction in 1954 and opened later that year. In the Plan of Airports of 1957, Barajas Airport is classified as a first-class international airport. By the 1970s, large jets were landing at Barajas, and the growth of traffic mainly as a result of tourism exceeded forecasts. At the beginning of the decade, the airport reached the 1.2 million passengers, double that envisaged in the Plan of Airports of 1957. In the 1970s, with the boom in tourism and the arrival of the
Boeing 747, the airport reached 4 million passengers and began the construction of the international terminal (current T1). In 1974,
Iberia, L.A.E. introduced the shuttle service between Madrid and Barcelona, a service with multiple daily frequencies and available without prior reservation. The
1982 FIFA World Cup brought significant expansion and modernisation of the airport's two existing terminals. was built by
Ferrovial and inaugurated on 5 February 2006. Terminal 4 is one of the world's largest
airport terminals in terms of area, with 760,000 square meters (8,180,572 square feet) in separate landside and airside structures. It consists of a main building, T4 () and a satellite building, T4S (), which are approximately apart. The new Terminal 4 is designed to give passengers a stress-free start to their journey. This is managed through careful use of illumination, with glass panes instead of walls and numerous skylights which allow natural light into the structure. With this new addition, Barajas is designed to handle 70 million passengers annually. During the construction of Terminal 4, two more runways (15L/33R and 18L/36R) were constructed to aid in the flow of air traffic arriving and departing from Barajas. These runways were officially inaugurated on 5 February 2006 (together with the terminals), but had already been used on several occasions beforehand to test flight and air traffic manoeuvres. Thus, Barajas came to have four runways: two on a north–south axis and parallel to each other (separated by ) and two on a northwest–southeast axis (and separated by ). This allowed simultaneous takeoffs and landings into the airport, allowing 120 operations an hour (one takeoff or landing every 30 seconds). Terminals 1, 2 and 3 are adjacent terminals that are home to
SkyTeam and
Star Alliance airlines. Terminal 4 is home to
Iberia, its franchise
Air Nostrum and all
Oneworld partner airlines. Gate numbers are continuous in terminals 1, 2 and 3 (A1 to E89), but are separately numbered in terminal 4 (H, J, K and M, R, S, U in satellite building). The Madrid–Barcelona
air shuttle service, known as the "Puente Aéreo" (in Spanish), literally called "Air Bridge", used to be the world's busiest with 971 flights per week in 2007. The schedule has been reduced since the February 2008 opening of the
Madrid–Barcelona high-speed rail line which covers the distance in hours. Subsequently, the route has been
overtaken by London-Dublin and Paris-Toulouse. On the morning of 30 December 2006,
an explosion took place in the carpark building module D attached to Terminal 4. Authorities received a
bomb threat at approximately 8:15 local time (7:15
GMT), with the caller stating that a car bomb carried with of explosive would explode at 9:00 local time (8:00 GMT). After receiving the warning, police were able to evacuate part of the airport. Later, an anonymous caller stated that
ETA claims responsibility for the bombing. As a result of the explosion, two Ecuadorians who were sleeping in their cars died. The whole module D of the car park was levelled creating around 40,000 tonnes of debris. It took workers six days to recover the body of the second victim from the rubble. In 2007, the airport processed more than 52 million passengers. Barajas was voted "Best Airport" in the 2008
Condé Nast Traveller Reader Awards. In December 2010, the Spanish government announced plans to tender Madrid–Barajas airport to companies in the private sector for a period of up to 40 years. On 27 January 2012,
Spanair suspended all flights affecting Madrid–Barajas as well as other domestic and international connections. On 20 September 2012, both runways 15/33 were renamed as 14R/32L (the longest) and 14L/32R (the shortest). On 1 August 2015, the first scheduled
Airbus A380 flight landed in Madrid-Barajas in a daily service to
Dubai by
Emirates. Following the death of former Spanish Prime Minister,
Adolfo Suárez, in 2014, the Spanish
Ministry of Public Works and Transport announced ==Airlines and destinations==