Munich Airport (MUC), officially named Flughafen München Franz Josef Strauss, opened on May 17, 1992, replacing Munich-Riem Airport, which had served the city since 1939. The relocation was completed in a single overnight operation: 5,000 workers and 700 trucks transferred the entire operation in just 16 hours, the largest airport relocation in European aviation history at the time. When operations began the next morning, MUC inherited Riem's IATA code and immediately assumed its place as one of Germany's premier international gateways.

The airport sits approximately 30 kilometers northeast of Munich's city center, near the town of Freising, in the flat Erdinger Moos lowlands. That geography placed it at the natural crossroads for traffic from Austria and Switzerland. Travelers in both countries face a shorter surface journey to MUC than to Frankfurt. Lufthansa, constrained at its Frankfurt base, established a secondary hub here early in the airport's life, and Terminal 2 (completed in June 2003 in a first-of-its-kind joint agreement between an airline and an airport) was built specifically to serve Lufthansa and its Star Alliance partners. A midfield satellite connected to Terminal 2 via underground shuttle opened in April 2016, adding further capacity. Today the airport serves over 220 destinations and handled more than 43 million passengers in 2025.

MUC is consistently ranked among Europe's best airports in Skytrax and ACI global surveys and has been named Best Airport in Central Europe multiple times. Carriers including Emirates, Qatar Airways, Singapore Airlines, and American Airlines operate routes alongside Lufthansa's dense network, making it a genuine intercontinental hub rather than a secondary feeder airport. Direct S-Bahn rail service on the S1 and S8 lines connects the airport to central Munich in roughly 40 minutes.