History
During World War II, the airfield was used by the British Royal Air Force and was named RAF Castel Benito later changing to RAF Idris in 1952. In the 1950s and 1960s the airport was named Tripoli Idris International Airport. The airport was renovated for national and international air travel in September 1978. The existing international terminal was designed and built from a masterplan developed by Sir Alexander Gibb & Partners.
The airport closed from March 2011 to October 2011 as a result of United Nations Security Council establishing a no-fly zone over Libya.
Anti-Gaddafi forces captured the airport during their advance on Tripoli on 21 August 2011. The airport was officially reopened on 11 October 2011. In April 2012, the Zintan Brigdade officially handed the control of the airport to the Libyan government forces.
Read more about this topic: Tripoli International Airport
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“No matter how vital experience might be while you lived it, no sooner was it ended and dead than it became as lifeless as the piles of dry dust in a school history book.”
—Ellen Glasgow (1874–1945)
“Postmodernism is, almost by definition, a transitional cusp of social, cultural, economic and ideological history when modernism’s high-minded principles and preoccupations have ceased to function, but before they have been replaced with a totally new system of values. It represents a moment of suspension before the batteries are recharged for the new millennium, an acknowledgment that preceding the future is a strange and hybrid interregnum that might be called the last gasp of the past.”
—Gilbert Adair, British author, critic. Sunday Times: Books (London, April 21, 1991)
“Man watches his history on the screen with apathy and an occasional passing flicker of horror or indignation.”
—Conor Cruise O’Brien (b. 1917)