Portal:North West England

Manchester Airport (IATA: MAN, ICAO: EGCC) is a major airport in Manchester, England. It opened to airline traffic in June 1938. It was initially known as Ringway Airport and during World War Two, as RAF Ringway. From 1975 until 1986, the title Manchester International Airport was used. It is located on the boundary between Cheshire and Manchester in the metropolitan county of Greater Manchester.

It has two parallel runways, the second of which opened in 2001 at a cost of £172 million. The airport has three adjacent terminals and a railway station. It is owned by the Manchester Airports Group (MAG) which is controlled by the ten metropolitan borough councils of Greater Manchester and is the largest British-owned airport group.

Manchester Airport has a CAA Public Use Aerodrome Licence (Number P712) that allows flights for the public transport of passengers and for flying instruction.

Manchester Airport is the fourth busiest airport in the United Kingdom (after London Heathrow, London Gatwick and London Stansted). In total passengers handled, Manchester ranked 48th in the world in 2005, down from 45th in 2004. Also, in 2006 Manchester had a recorded 234,835 aircraft movements, of which 213,100 were air transport movements (third highest in the UK) behind Heathrow and just under Gatwick.

Alan Mathison Turing, OBE, FRS (/ˈtjʊərɪŋ/; 23 June 1912 – 7 June 1954) was an English mathematician, logician, and cryptographer.

Turing is often considered to be the father of modern computer science. Turing provided an influential formalisation of the concept of the algorithm and computation with the Turing machine, formulating the now widely accepted "Turing" version of the Church–Turing thesis, namely that any practical computing model has either the equivalent or a subset of the capabilities of a Turing machine. With the Turing test, he made a significant and characteristically provocative contribution to the debate regarding artificial intelligence: whether it will ever be possible to say that a machine is conscious and can think. He later worked at the National Physical Laboratory, creating one of the first designs for a stored-program computer, although it was never actually built. In 1948 he moved to the University of Manchester to work on the Manchester Mark I, then emerging as one of the world's earliest true computers.

During the Second World War Turing worked at Bletchley Park, Britain's codebreaking centre, and was for a time head of Hut 8, the section responsible for German naval cryptanalysis. He devised a number of techniques for breaking German ciphers, including the method of the bombe, an electromechanical machine that could find settings for the Enigma machine.

In 1952, Turing was convicted of "acts of gross indecency" after admitting to a sexual relationship with a man in Manchester. He was placed on probation and required to undergo estrogen therapy to achieve temporary chemical castration. Turing died after eating an apple laced with cyanide in 1954. His death was ruled a suicide.