Memphis International Airport traces its origins to 1927, when Mayor Watkins Overton commissioned a site study for a municipal airfield. The commission chose Ward Farm, a 200-acre plot of open farmland seven miles from downtown, and on June 14, 1929, Memphis Municipal Airport was dedicated with 3 hangars and a sod runway. More than 200 aircraft flew in for the two-day ceremony. It was an emphatic beginning.

The airport expanded steadily through the mid-20th century. A modern terminal followed in 1938, the U.S. Army took control during World War II, and a new $5.5 million terminal dedicated in 1963 prompted a renaming to Memphis Metropolitan Airport. The name changed again in 1969, to Memphis International Airport, reflecting growing international traffic. The transformation that would define MEM for the next half-century arrived in 1973, when FedEx began flying out of Memphis with 14 aircraft on its first night of operations. By 1993, the combination of FedEx's around-the-clock hub activity and MEM's central geography had made it the busiest cargo airport in the world, a title it held through 2009. Today it ranks among the busiest cargo airports in North America, handling billions of pounds of freight annually through the FedEx SuperHub.

Passenger operations tell a different story. A major passenger hub launched in 1985 under Republic Airlines, later merged into Northwest and then inherited by Delta, collapsed after Delta's 2013 downsizing, leaving the airport, built for far greater passenger volume, to consolidate activity into a modernized Concourse B. American Airlines, Southwest, and Delta now anchor the passenger side, connecting Memphis to hubs in Dallas-Fort Worth, Charlotte, Chicago, and beyond. The airport spans 3,900 acres and operates 4 concrete runways, the longest stretching 11,120 feet, infrastructure scaled for the heaviest freighters on earth, not commuter jets.