Glasgow Prestwick Airport (IATA: PIK, ICAO: EGPK), commonly referred to as Prestwick Airport, is an international airport serving the west of Scotland, situated one nautical mile (two kilometres) northeast of the town of Prestwick Scotland, and 32 miles (51 kilometres) southwest of Glasgow, Scotland. It is the less busy of the two airports serving the western part of Scotland’s Central Belt, after Glasgow Airport in Renfrewshire, within the Greater Glasgow conurbation. The airport serves the urban cluster surrounding Ayr, including Kilmarnock, Irvine, Ardrossan, Troon, Saltcoats, Stevenston, Kilwinning, and Prestwick itself.
Glasgow Prestwick is Scotland’s fifth-busiest airport in terms of passenger traffic, 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.
There has been much public debate and speculation over the association of the airport with Glasgow due to the fact Prestwick and Glasgow are considerably far apart. Calls have been made for the airport to be renamed Robert Burns International Airport, however, this was ruled out by the Scottish Government in 2014.
Prestwick has also had a long historical connection with transatlantic flight, being part of the Atlantic Bridge route between Europe and North America, and remains an important airport for both the United States Air Force and Royal Canadian Air Force, who use it as a refuelling stop., and in the case of the former the favoured airport used by Air Force One whenever the President of the United States is visiting Scotland. The operations centre of Shanwick Oceanic Control is located close to the airport, which controls all air traffic on the north eastern quadrant of the North Atlantic Ocean, including Scottish airspace (Scottish Area Control Centre), as well as the airspace over much of the north of England, the Midlands and north Wales (Manchester Area Control Centre).
