The airport opens

Svalbard Airport opened in 1975 at Hotellneset, on the west side of Longyearbyen. The Store norske leksikon, in its article on Longyearbyen, places the airfield at Hotellneset, west of the town, and its article on Svalbard says the airport was officially opened in 1975. The passages give no day or month for the opening. Kristensen, in her book Det magiske landet, writes that it opened in the autumn of 1975.

Before the airport, the way to the mainland was by sea. The lexicon says that before 1975 Svalbard and Longyearbyen were tied to the mainland by boat for up to seven months of the year. Kristensen describes the same winter gap: after the last coal boat in November and before the first one in June, there was no way to leave Svalbard. The jubilee history of Store Norske (the state-owned mining company) records that from May to November most passenger traffic went over the quay at Hotellneset, the same place where the airport was later built.

Kristensen writes that Svalbard Airport was built to the highest class of international standard, both in the size of its runways and in its instruments, while the arrival hall did not match that. In her account, scheduled flights from Norway came once a week through the winter, and on rare days bad weather forced the aircraft to turn back to Tromsø. Lund, in his book Kalde krigsår, gives a different year. He writes that the main change came in 1978, when the well equipped airport was completed. He adds that the air link had developed over several years, including a period with a winter airstrip on the snow in Adventdalen. The lexicon and Kristensen both give 1975.

The lexicon's article on the history of Svalbard says that establishing the airport at Longyearbyen in 1975 was a big step away from the earlier isolation through the winter half-year, and that Svalbard is now closely tied to scheduled air traffic. The jubilee history of Store Norske says that, next to better housing, nothing has mattered as much to daily life in Longyearbyen as the airport. It lists travel home when something happens to family, visits, an ambulance service and post, and says the isolation is broken for good. Kristensen adds that it became possible to reach a hospital in Norway for injuries and acute illness.

For the airport itself, the lexicon reports that flights now run daily between Longyearbyen and Tromsø or Oslo. It adds that the boat season has been extended to nearly the whole year because sea ice often fails to form, and that charts and navigation aids have improved.