Budapest Airport Layover Without Leaving BUD

Budapest’s Ferenc Liszt airport has a field of retired Malév airliners parked fifteen minutes’ walk from Terminal 2, and for anyone whose connection never leaves the secure side, the SkyCourt between the two piers carries five levels of shops, food and lounges.

The retired Malév jets at Aeropark

Malév, Hungary’s national airline for 66 years, stopped flying overnight in February 2012 and left a lot of aircraft behind. A good part of what survived is standing on grass at the edge of this airfield, in the open, arranged so you walk between the wings rather than look at them over a rope: an Ilyushin Il-14 in Malév’s blue and white, a four-engined Il-18 turboprop, a Yak-40, an An-2 biplane, a Tupolev whose cockpit you can climb into.

The collection started in 1988 with a single Il-14 handed over by the Soviet army, opened as the Ferihegy Aircraft Park in 1991, took its current name in 2014 and was shifted wholesale to its present site in 2017 to make room for a car park. Adult admission is around 4,300 forints, children and concessions about 2,500. It opens daily from late March to early November, roughly nine to six, and cuts back to weekends only through the winter, so check the day before rather than assuming.

The SkyCourt between Terminal 2A and 2B

Terminal 2 is one building split by a border: 2A takes flights within the Schengen area, 2B takes everything else, and the SkyCourt is the glazed hall that joins them once you are through security. Five levels, most of the airport’s shops and restaurants, and lounges that mostly sell walk-in access at the door rather than asking for a membership card or a business-class boarding pass.

What is actually open to you here is decided by your boarding pass rather than by how many hours you have: a passenger connecting airside never reaches the arrivals hall, the bus stop or the museum at all, while anyone who has cleared passport control walks out of the building carrying whatever they checked in with.

Terminal 1 was built in the shape of an aircraft

The original terminal stands across the airfield from Terminal 2, next to Ferihegy railway station, and it is the only listed monument on the airport site. Károly Dávid Jr. won the competition for it in 1939, having trained in Le Corbusier’s Paris office, and drew a plan that reads as an aeroplane from above: the departure hall as the fuselage, the city-side frontage as the tailplane, the runway-facing blocks as the wings, and a stone-clad control tower standing on columns at each wingtip in place of engines. Concrete work started in 1942, the war wrecked much of it, and it finally opened on 7 May 1950.

It handled the low-cost carriers until 2012 and has taken no scheduled flights since; it is a protected monument, and the reason it has not come back is commercial rather than structural. You cannot go in, but the 200E bus from Terminal 2 runs right past it on the way to Kőbánya-Kispest, so it costs nothing to see if you were catching that bus anyway.

Forty minutes on a bus reaches the middle of Budapest

The 100E airport bus runs from the terminal kerb to Deák Ferenc tér, the square in central Pest where all three metro lines meet, in about 40 minutes. It has its own 2,500-forint fare, not covered by ordinary Budapest tickets, and it runs every six to ten minutes through the day and every half hour or so overnight. The cheaper route is the 200E to Kőbánya-Kispest and metro line M3 from there, one 850-forint ticket end to end, but 50 to 60 minutes with the change and no use after the metro stops around 11pm.

Four hours between flights is roughly where the trip starts to make sense, once you have counted the return leg and the second pass through security. Below that, this side of the airport is the whole of it. If your stop is comfortably longer, the main Budapest guide covers the riverbank walk that route reaches, and there is a separate one for the station end of town if your onward leg is a train rather than a flight.