Salina Regional Airport (SLN) traces its origins to World War II. The site began as Smoky Hill Army Air Field, activated on September 1, 1942, built on 2,600 acres southwest of Salina with the help of nearly 7,000 construction workers. It trained heavy bomber crews on B-17s and later B-29s, feeding combat units into overseas theaters. After the war, the base was redesignated Smoky Hill Air Force Base in January 1948 and renamed Schilling Air Force Base in 1957, in honor of Colonel David C. Schilling. The Defense Department closed Schilling in 1965. By May of that year, the Salina Airport Authority had been created and conversion to a civilian airport was underway.

The airport today sits on a 2,900-acre site that retains one of its most consequential Cold War assets: a 12,300-foot primary runway, one of the longest in the country, originally built to accommodate strategic bombers. That runway is what brought Steve Fossett and the Virgin Atlantic GlobalFlyer to Salina. On February 28, 2005, Fossett took off from SLN and returned on March 3, completing the first solo, nonstop, non-refueled circumnavigation of the earth in 67 hours, 1 minute, and 10 seconds. The airport honors that record with Fossett Plaza, a permanent memorial on the grounds. In 2006, Fossett departed Salina again in the GlobalFlyer to break the world record for distance over a closed circuit.

Commercially, SLN is the only commercial service airport for a broad swath of north-central Kansas, with United Express providing daily service to Chicago O'Hare, Denver, and Houston. The Kansas State University Salina Aerospace and Technology Campus sits directly adjacent to the airfield, using its runways for professional pilot training and making SLN one of the more active general aviation environments in the region, with roughly 70,884 aircraft operations recorded in the year ending March 2023.