Gatwick Airport Information

Gatwick International Airport is London's second largest airport and the second busiest airport in the United Kingdom after Heathrow. It is also the world's busiest single runway airport, and the world's 22nd busiest airport (7th in terms of international passengers) in terms of passengers per year. It is located in Crawley, West Sussex 5 km (3 miles) north of the town centre, 46 km (28 miles) south of London and 40 km (25 miles) north of Brighton.

With about 200 destinations the airport handled over 34 million passengers with 263,363 aircraft movements in 2006. Charter airlines are generally not allowed to operate from Heathrow and many use Gatwick instead as their base. Many flights to and from the USA also use Gatwick because of restrictions on transatlantic operations from Heathrow. The airport is a hub for British Airways and Virgin Atlantic.
Gatwick has two runways but the northern runway 08L/26R is a non-instrument runway and is only used when 08R/26L is temporarily non-operational because of maintenance or an accident. Both runways cannot be used at the same time because of insufficient separation between them. It can take up to 15 minutes to change over from one runway to the other.

Gatwick Airport is owned by BAA, the company which also owns London Heathrow, London Stansted, Glasgow International, Edinburgh, Aberdeen, and Southampton airports.