History
Don Muang airfield was the second established in Thailand, after Sa Pathum, which is now Sa Pathum horse racing course. The first flights to Don Muang were made on March 8, 1914 and involved the transfer of aircraft of the Royal Thai Air Force. Three years earlier, Thailand had sent three army officers to France to train as pilots. On completion of their training in 1911, the pilots were authorized to purchase four Breguets and four Nieuports, which formed the basis of the Royal Thai Air Force.
In 1933, the airfield was the scene of heavy fighting between royalists and government forces during the Boworadet Rebellion.
Commercial service to Don Muang began in 1924. The first commercial flight was an arrival by KLM.
The airfield was used by the occupying Japanese during World War II, and was bombed and strafed by Allied aircraft on several occasions.
During the Vietnam War, Don Muang was a major command and logistics hub of the United States Air Force.
Read more about this topic: Don Mueang International Airport
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“I am ashamed to see what a shallow village tale our so-called History is. How many times must we say Rome, and Paris, and Constantinople! What does Rome know of rat and lizard? What are Olympiads and Consulates to these neighboring systems of being? Nay, what food or experience or succor have they for the Esquimaux seal-hunter, or the Kanaka in his canoe, for the fisherman, the stevedore, the porter?”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“You treat world history as a mathematician does mathematics, in which nothing but laws and formulas exist, no reality, no good and evil, no time, no yesterday, no tomorrow, nothing but an eternal, shallow, mathematical present.”
—Hermann Hesse (1877–1962)
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