Dallas Love Field was commissioned on October 19, 1917, as a U.S. Army Air Service training base, one of 32 new airfields established after the United States entered World War I. Named for Lieutenant Moss L. Love, an Army aviator killed in a training crash near San Diego in 1913, the field had no geographic tie to Dallas; the city's chamber of commerce had simply lobbied successfully to bring it there. After the war, barnstormers and commercial pioneers moved in. The City of Dallas purchased the field in 1927, and by 1929, Delta Air Service had launched the first scheduled passenger flights from the airport.

The terminal that opened on January 20, 1958, gave DAL an unexpected distinction: it was the first airport in the world to install moving walkways. That same terminal witnessed one of the most consequential moments in American political history when, on November 22, 1963, Lyndon B. Johnson was sworn in as the 36th president aboard Air Force One on the DAL tarmac, hours after the assassination of President Kennedy. By 1964, Love Field was the largest air terminal in the Southwest.

The opening of Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport in 1974 nearly ended commercial service at DAL. Southwest Airlines, founded in 1967 and operating out of Love Field from the start, refused to move. The Wright Amendment, enacted in 1979, then restricted nonstop flights from DAL to Texas and a handful of adjacent states, effectively capping the airport's reach for decades. Full repeal came in October 2014, finally allowing nonstop service to any U.S. destination. Today, Southwest operates the overwhelming majority of flights from DAL's single terminal and 20 gates, with its headquarters campus directly adjacent to the airfield. The airport handles more than 16 million passengers annually and remains one of the most geographically convenient commercial airports in the country.