Tokyo Haneda International Airport (HND) opened on August 25, 1931, as Japan's first civil aviation national airport, built on 53 hectares of reclaimed land along Tokyo Bay in the Ota ward of the capital. Its inaugural flight carried cargo to Dalian in Manchuria. From the start, the airport was the primary base of Japan Air Transport, the country's flag carrier at the time. The original airfield had a single short concrete runway, a small terminal, and 2 hangars, a foundation that would expand dramatically over the following nine decades.

After being occupied by US military forces following World War II and returned to Japan in stages by 1958, the airport grew into the dominant hub for both domestic and international traffic. When Narita International Airport opened in 1978, Haneda was largely reassigned to domestic operations, handling almost all of Tokyo's internal flights while Narita absorbed international routes. That division held until 2010, when a fourth runway, the D Runway, was completed using a hybrid structure of land reclamation and steel piling at the mouth of the Tama River, a feat of engineering required by the airport's constrained waterfront position. A dedicated international terminal, now Terminal 3, opened the same year, restoring long-haul connectivity. Daytime international service expanded further in March 2014.

Today the airport operates 4 runways and 3 terminals, and serves as the primary domestic base for Japan Airlines (Terminal 1) and All Nippon Airways (Terminal 2), with Terminal 3 handling the majority of international carriers. The airport handled 85.7 million passengers in 2024, the most of any airport in Japan, and ranked among the top 5 busiest airports in the world by seat capacity as of mid-2025. Sitting just 15 kilometers south of central Tokyo, it is significantly more accessible to the city than Narita, a geographic advantage that has long made it the preferred hub for business travelers and premium routes. Because it is bordered by restricted military airspace to the west and dense urban areas to the north, most flights at HND execute circular approaches and departures over Tokyo Bay, a routing constraint that gives the airport's traffic patterns their distinctive, looping visual character.