A video using drone footage provides a “Birdseye” view of the old Athens airport at the southeast coastal Helleniko district, which for 60 years served as the Greek capital’s commercial airport – the largest such facility in Greece.
Construction began in 1938 in what was called the “Hasani” site, an obvious reference to a previous Ottoman place-name, and after the state’s appropriation of land from the nearby settlements of Komninos and Helleniko.
The last commercial aircraft to depart from the Helleniko airport was an Olympic Air Boeing 737 headed for Thessaloniki.
Seven abandoned airplanes are found at the site’s southeast corner today, which along with adjacent tracts of lands comprise the biggest – and red-tape-plagued – property development in Greece, and one of the biggest such projects in all of Europe.
One of the aircraft, a Boeing 747-200 named the “Olympic Eagle”, was purchased in 1973 by Aristotle Onassis, and used on the airline’s long-distance flights to all five continents.
