Munich Airport (MUC) opened on May 17, 1992, replacing Munich-Riem Airport, which had served the city since 1939. The transition was anything but routine. In a single overnight operation lasting just 16 hours, roughly 5,000 workers and 700 trucks transferred all operations from the old site in Riem to the new facility in Erdinger Moos, the largest airport relocation in European aviation history at the time. The new airport inherited the MUC IATA code from its predecessor on the day it opened.

Located 28.5 km northeast of Munich near the town of Freising, the airport sits in a flat expanse of former wetlands, with its entire terminal complex arranged between 2 parallel runways, each 4,000 meters long. That midfield layout, with Terminal 1 to the west, Terminal 2 to the east, and the Munich Airport Center connecting them, gives the campus an unusually coherent flow. Terminal 2, which opened in June 2003, was financed and is jointly operated by the airport and Lufthansa, a model unique in Europe. A satellite terminal connected to Terminal 2 via an underground people mover opened in April 2016, adding further gate capacity.

MUC is Lufthansa's secondary hub, and the airline's presence shapes the airport's character entirely. Terminal 2 and its satellite are reserved exclusively for Lufthansa and Star Alliance partners. By 2024, the airport handled 41.6 million passengers, ranking it second in Germany behind Frankfurt and eleventh in Europe. Long-haul routes to North America, East Asia, and the Gulf are well represented. The Munich Airport Center, which opened in 1999, includes what is claimed to be the world's first airport-owned brewery, Airbräu, a detail that says something about the airport's Bavarian confidence.