31st July: JFK Airport

On this date in 1948, President Harry Truman dedicated a recently opened airport in New York. We know it today as John F Kennedy Airport. !0 things you may not know about JFK:

1. It went through several name changes. Before it was built it was going to be called Major General Alexander E. Anderson Airport after a National Guard Commander. By 1948, New York City Council had re-named it New York International Airport, Anderson Field but it was more commonly known as Idlewild Airport until it was re-named in memory of John F. Kennedy in 1963.
2. It was built on the site of the Idlewild Golf Course. Idlewild means "peaceful but savage".
3. The first plane to land at the new airport was a Peruvian International Airways DC-4, piloted by Captain Douglas Larsen, while the first scheduled flight to land was a Peruvian International Airlines DC-4 from Santiago Chile. Try as I might, I can find no information about the first plane to take off. You'd think somebody somewhere would have made a note of that, but it doesn't seem to have reached the Internet.
4. The airport has had to undergo significant modifications as planes get bigger. JFK was designed to accommodate aircraft no larger than a Douglas DC-6, so Boeing 747s presented a challenge which needed to be solved in the late 1960s.
5. In March 2007, JFK became the first airport in the United States to receive the Airbus A380 with passengers aboard.
6. Today it is the 17th busiest airport in the world (50,423,765 passengers in 2013).
7. JFK covers 4,930 acres, of which 880 acres are in the Central Terminal Area. It has about 30 miles of roadway.
8. It has the second-longest commercial runway in North America (the longest is a 16,000 feet (4,900 m) runway at Denver International Airport).
9. Roughly 35,000 people are employed at the airport.
10. It is operated by The Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, under a lease with the City of New York, and has been since it first opened. The lease is set to last until 2050.