Cincinnati/Northern Kentucky International Airport (CVG) opened for commercial service on January 10, 1947, when an American Airlines DC-3 from Cleveland touched down at 9:53 a.m. Delta and TWA followed moments later. The airport traces its roots to a World War II auxiliary airfield built in 1944 as a practice field for B-17 bombers. Its three-letter code, CVG, derives not from Cincinnati or its Kentucky home of Boone County, but from Covington, the nearest major city when the airport was named.

For decades, the airport's story was inseparable from Delta Air Lines. Delta made CVG its second-largest hub through the 1980s and 1990s, and by 2005 the airport was processing over 600 daily departures to nearly 150 destinations. It processed over 22.7 million passengers that year. Then Delta filed for bankruptcy, began cutting routes, and the subsequent merger with Northwest Airlines in 2008 ended CVG's run as a connecting hub. Passenger numbers fell by roughly 74% over the following decade.

The airport reinvented itself around cargo. DHL established its U.S. hub there in 1984. Amazon Air opened its primary U.S. cargo hub on the CVG campus in August 2021, a $1.5 billion facility on 600 acres. Together, those two operations helped make CVG the 5th busiest cargo airport in the United States and 14th largest in the world as of 2023. The airport covers 7,000 acres and operates 4 runways: 3 parallel north-south runways and a single crosswind runway, a configuration built to support round-the-clock freight operations. Passenger service has grown steadily since 2021, with carriers including American, Delta, Frontier, Allegiant, and Southwest serving dozens of domestic and international destinations.