Hartsfield-Jackson: The World's Busiest Airport

You are flying over one of the most consequential pieces of infrastructure in the American South, even if you are driving past it right now. Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport handles more passengers than any other airport on Earth, a title it has held for more than two decades running.

The story starts in nineteen twenty-six, when Atlanta opened a modest airfield on land leased from a racetrack. The city had the foresight, under Mayor William Hartsfield, to acquire land aggressively before anyone else understood what commercial aviation would become. Hartsfield served as mayor for twenty-three years and became so identified with the airport's growth that it was named for him after his death.

The real transformation came with the jet age. Delta Air Lines, founded in nineteen twenty-five as a crop-dusting operation in Macon, Georgia that later relocated to Monroe, Louisiana, moved its headquarters to Atlanta in nineteen forty-one and grew alongside the city. By the nineteen sixties, Atlanta had positioned itself as the undisputed air hub of the Southeast. The opening of the Maynard Holbrook Jackson International Terminal in two thousand twelve added the second name to the airport's title, honoring Atlanta's first Black mayor, who had used airport concession contracts in the nineteen seventies as a lever to integrate Atlanta's business community.

The current airport opened its main terminal in nineteen eighty and its underground people-mover concourse system in nineteen eighty-one, a design that remains the template other airports still copy. More than one hundred million passengers move through annually. Atlanta's dominance is not accidental: it sits within a two-hour flight of roughly eighty percent of the United States population, and Delta's hub structure ensures connections flow through here by design.

For the South, the airport did something no railroad had quite managed: it made Atlanta the unavoidable center of gravity for the entire region, from Virginia to Texas.