Airports named after famous people, from aviators and artists to footballers ... and a Mr O’Hare

Naming airports after national heroes and illustrious residents is all the rage, but next time you rush through a terminal building, pause to ponder how anyone got to be so famous that they had an entire airport dedicated to their achieve­ments.

New York’s JFK needs no explanation, but why did the operators of the airport in Palermo, Sicily, choose to immortalise Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino?

And who, exactly, was O’Hare?

1 Aviators

Let’s start in Ohio, in the United States, where Montgomery County Airport was renamed Dayton-Wright Brothers Airport in 1995 to honour the inventors of the first successful powered aircraft. Nitpickers could point out that only Orville Wright was born in Dayton, and that Kitty Hawk – the town in North Carolina close to where the first powered flights took place, in 1903 – is more than 1,000km away.

Chicago O’Hare International Airport, meanwhile, is named after a second world war US Navy pilot who single-handedly prevented an attack on an aircraft carrier by shooting down six Japanese bombers. Edward Henry “Butch” O’Hare was awarded the Medal of Honour in 1942.

He died a year later while on a night mission.