Detroit Metropolitan Wayne County Airport opened on September 4, 1930, on land purchased by Wayne County at the corner of Middlebelt and Wick roads in Romulus, Michigan. It began as a mail and light commercial airfield. During World War II the U.S. Army took control, operating it as the Romulus Army Air Field and using it as a staging base for ferrying military aircraft to Europe. Commercial expansion came steadily afterward.

By the 1960s, DTW had become Metro Detroit's dominant airport. Republic Airlines established a hub there in the 1980s; Northwest Airlines absorbed that operation through its 1986 merger with Republic, turning DTW into one of the country's most strategically positioned connecting hubs, a midpoint between the eastern U.S. and Northwest's Pacific routes to Asia. The airport's modern identity was set on February 24, 2002, when the $1.2 billion Edward H. McNamara Terminal opened. Designed by SmithGroup architect David King, the midfield facility spans roughly 2 million square feet and includes the world's first airport people mover to operate inside a terminal building rather than outdoors or in tunnels. A 700-foot underground passenger tunnel connecting Concourse A to Concourses B and C features a color-shifting LED light installation that has become one of the airport's most recognizable design elements. Northwest merged with Delta Air Lines in 2008, and DTW became a primary Delta hub, today accounting for roughly 74% of the airport's flights. The Evans Terminal, opened in 2008 and renamed in 2022, handles all non-Delta carriers.

DTW serves more than 33 million passengers annually, connecting Detroit to destinations across Europe, Asia, and the Americas. Amsterdam, Paris Charles de Gaulle, and Frankfurt rank among its busiest international routes. The airport sits at the geographic center of a region defined by automotive manufacturing, and that industrial heritage still shapes the demand patterns: heavy corporate and connecting traffic, with a passenger mix broad enough that terminal signage appears in Japanese and Mandarin alongside English.