Amsterdam Airport Schiphol opened on 16 September 1916 as a military airbase on land purchased from a Haarlemmermeer farmer. Civil aircraft began using the field in December 1920, and the military departed entirely in 1923. The airport sits on a drained lake bed, roughly 4 metres below sea level, a geographic oddity that made its early years notoriously muddy and earned it the nickname Schiphol-Les-Bains.

KLM, founded on 7 October 1919, operated its inaugural flight to Schiphol on 17 May 1920, when pilot Jerry Shaw flew a leased De Havilland DH-16 from London Croydon carrying 2 journalists and a stack of newspapers. That single flight marked the birth of commercial aviation in the Netherlands. The airport was heavily damaged during World War II and required near-total reconstruction, reopening for passenger service in July 1945. A completely new facility, Schiphol-Centrum, was opened by Queen Juliana on 28 April 1967, introducing what would become the airport's defining feature: a single-terminal concept with departure halls connected by lettered piers. The Dutch government formally designated it a national Mainport in 1988. A direct rail link to Amsterdam had already opened in 1978, anchoring the airport within the national transport network.

Today AMS ranks as the world's 5th busiest airport by international passenger traffic and one of Europe's busiest by aircraft movements. KLM and its regional affiliate KLM Cityhopper are the dominant carriers, with Delta Air Lines, easyJet, and Transavia among the major operators. The Polderbaan, a sixth runway added in 2003, sits 5 kilometres from the terminal, far enough to require its own air traffic control tower. The airport operates under strict government slot limits, a constraint that shapes everything from airline strategy to gate planning.