Originally Posted by
wayner92
As an aside - does anyone know why the KEF airport is so freakin' far from Reykjavik? You drive for 45 minutes through a desolate landscape to get to the airport - why couldn't they have built it 50km farther north on the outskirts of the city?
As already mentioned by other posters, KEF was originally built by the Americans as a military airfield during WWII and was used as a NATO base throughout the Cold War. There wasn't even a dedicated civilian terminal building there until 1987.
There have been serious proposals to build a new airport closer to the southern outskirts of the city to take over the current functions of RKV which the city authorities want to shut down but it is unclear if that is feasible or not. KEF is pretty far away from Reykjavík measured in distance but measured in travel time it is hardly that far compared to many other cities around the world. Improved ground transport could shorten that time further and would probably be better use of money than a whole new airport closer to Reykjavík.