Kuwait’s Directorate General of Civil Aviation dates the start of flying here to 1927 and 1928, when the country’s first airport opened in the Dasma area. KUNA, the state news agency, marked seventy-five years since the first aircraft landed at old Dasma airport in December 2003 — the same year, counted backwards.
A strip behind the wall
It was not an airport in any sense a traveller would recognise. KUNA describes it as lying behind the city wall by the Buraiessa gate, with no control tower, no lighting and no administration in its early years. Level ground, and an aeroplane that came down on it.
Why aircraft passed this way
Because Kuwait sat on Britain’s route to India. Imperial Airways flew that line, and DGCA records the first regular civil operations at Dasma in 1932. KUNA names the same carrier as the first to use the field as a refuelling point on the London-India run.
The context is that Britain shifted the India trunk route from the Persian shore of the Gulf to the Arab shore in 1932, which put the stops on this side. Bahrain’s Ministry of Transportation records services running via Basrah, Bahrain and Sharjah, “with Kuwait added soon after as an optional calling point”.
Two full files in the British political agent’s papers are titled Kuwait landing ground — one running 1929 to 1939, the second 1939 to 1949 — covering site selection and construction. Both are digitised in the Qatar Digital Library.
Dasma runs out of room
In 1947 and 1948 the Kuwait Oil Company built a new field in the Nuzha district, which the civil aviation record calls Al-Nugra, or Al-Mayass, with concrete buildings and a hangar. It worked in daylight only. KUNA puts the move at 1948.
A national carrier, six years later
Kuwait Airways’ own corporate history says two Kuwaiti businessmen moved in February 1953, and that Kuwait National Airways Limited was formally established in March 1954. Its first aircraft was a DC-3 called the Blue Bird, flying to Basra, Beirut, Jerusalem, Damascus and Abadan. The state took half the company in 1955, when it was renamed Kuwait Airways, and bought the remaining shares in May 1962.
The airport of today
DGCA logs phase one of the new Mugwa airport entering service in 1961, with a 2,200-metre asphalt runway, a control tower equipped for round-the-clock work, and a passenger terminal. KUNA dates the opening of the first phase of Kuwait International Airport to 1962 and gives a paved runway of 10,000 feet plus radar. The two figures differ and both sources are official. The aircraft-shaped terminal came with the second phase, in 1980.
Photograph: a Handley Page H.P.42, the type Imperial Airways flew on the London-India route, photographed in May 1932. It shows the aircraft type, not Dasma. San Diego Air and Space Museum archive, public domain via Wikimedia Commons.
Sources: the Directorate General of Civil Aviation, KUNA, Kuwait Airways, the Qatar Digital Library, and Bahrain’s Ministry of Transportation and Telecommunications.
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