Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport began in 1926 as Candler Field, an airmail stop built on an abandoned auto racetrack leased from Coca-Cola magnate Asa Candler. Delta Air Lines and Eastern Air Lines made Atlanta a connecting point early on, exploiting its position at the crossroads of the American Southeast. The airport was renamed for former mayor William B. Hartsfield in 1971, and Maynard Jackson's name was added in 2003 to honor Atlanta's first Black mayor, who championed its transformative expansion.
That expansion, the 1980 Midfield Terminal, introduced the parallel-concourse layout connected by an underground people mover that still defines the airport. A fourth parallel runway came in 1984, the international Concourse E opened ahead of the 1996 Olympics. A fifth runway, built on a bridge over Interstate 285, opened in 2006 to push capacity past 100 movements per hour. The Maynard H. Jackson Jr. International Terminal opened in 2012 on the airport's east side. Atlanta has been the world's busiest passenger airport nearly every year since 1998, briefly ceding the title only during the pandemic. In 2015 it became the first airport anywhere to handle more than 100 million passengers in a single year.