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
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“The history of work has been, in part, the history of the workers body. Production depended on what the body could accomplish with strength and skill. Techniques that improve output have been driven by a general desire to decrease the pain of labor as well as by employers intentions to escape dependency upon that knowledge which only the sentient laboring body could provide.”
—Shoshana Zuboff (b. 1951)
“The history of his present majesty, is a history of unremitting injuries and usurpations ... all of which have in direct object the establishment of an absolute tyranny over these states. To prove this, let facts be submitted to a candid world, for the truth of which we pledge a faith yet unsullied by falsehood.”
—Thomas Jefferson (17431826)
“For a transitory enchanted moment man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent, compelled into an aesthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired, face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder.”
—F. Scott Fitzgerald (18961940)