History
Stapleton was opened on October 17, 1929 as Denver Municipal Airport. Its name was changed to Stapleton Airfield after a 1944 expansion, in honor of Benjamin F. Stapleton, the city's mayor most of the time from 1923 to 1947, and the major force behind the project when it began in 1928. Concourse A, the original building from 1929, was still in operation when the airport closed. The airport was originally created by Ira Boyd Humphreys in 1919.
1938 airport diagram
The March 1939 Official Aviation Guide shows nine weekday airline departures: 7 United and 2 Continental. The April 1957 shows 38 on United, 12 Continental, seven Braniff, seven Frontier, seven Western, five TWA and one Central.
A new jet runway and terminal building opened in 1964. Concourse D was built in 1972. After deregulation three airlines had hubs at Stapleton: (Frontier Airlines, Continental Airlines, and United Airlines), leading to congestion. To combat the congestion, runway (18/36) was added in the 1980s, and the terminal was again expanded with the $250 million (or $58 million according to the New York Times) 24 gate Concourse E opening in 1988, despite Denver's new replacement airport already under construction. At the time of its closure in 1995, Stapleton had six runways (2 sets of 3 parallel runways) and five terminal concourses.
In 1982 the inaugural revenue flight of the Boeing 767 landed at Stapleton, after a flight from O'Hare International Airport in Chicago.
During the energy boom of the early 1980s several new skyscrapers were built in downtown Denver including Republic Plaza (Denver's tallest at 714'). Due to Stapleton's location 3 miles (4.8 km) east of downtown Denver the Federal Aviation Administration imposed a building height restriction of 700'-715' (depending on where the building was). This allowed an unimpeded glide slope for runways (8L/26R) and (8R/26L). The height restriction was lifted in 1995, well after the city's skyscrapers had been erected.
Stapleton Airport was the site for Ted Fujita's studies of microbursts.
On February 25, 1995, George Hosford, Air Traffic Controller, cleared the last plane (Continental Flight 34, to London Gatwick) to depart from Stapleton International Airport. This would also mark the end of Continental Airlines' use of Denver as its hub.
Read more about this topic: Stapleton International Airport
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