Amsterdam Airport Schiphol opened on 19 September 1916 as a military airfield on the flat polder of Haarlemmermeer, roughly 9 kilometres southwest of Amsterdam. When the First World War ended, the military handed it over, and on 17 May 1920 the first passenger service arrived from London, a KLM flight that marked the birth of commercial aviation in the Netherlands.

The site itself is extraordinary. The entire airport lies below sea level, with the lowest point reaching 3.4 metres below the Dutch datum. What was once a lake, the Haarlemmermeer, drained between 1848 and 1852, is now one of Europe's busiest aviation hubs. In 1967, Queen Juliana opened the current Schiphol-Centre, designed by Marius Duintjer: a single terminal encircled by piers, a concept considered a world first at the time. The airport connected to the national rail network in 1978, and a new air traffic control tower, 101 metres tall, opened in 1991. KLM, founded in 1919 and the oldest airline still operating under its original name, has always been based at Schiphol and remains its dominant carrier as part of the Air France-KLM group.

Schiphol operates on a single-terminal concept, all departure halls under one roof, branching into piers, which gives transfer passengers unusually smooth connections. Its 6 runways spread wide across the flat polder; the Polderbaan, the outermost, lies 7 kilometres north of the control tower, meaning taxi times alone can exceed 20 minutes. The airport is a designated Mainport for the Dutch economy, a status formalised by the central government in 1988 reflecting its role as a critical national infrastructure asset as much as a gateway to Amsterdam.