Sapporo's air traffic long used Okadama Airport near the city, but that field was too small for jet planes. A public terminal opened at Chitose, about 40 kilometers south of the city, sharing runways with a Japan Air Self Defense Force base. Traffic shifted there through the 1960s and 1970s. Demand from Honshu, and especially from Tokyo, kept climbing until the shared setup became a real problem.
New Chitose Airport opened in 1988, in July, on land just east of the base it had long shared runways with. For the first time, civilian flights got their own pair of runways and a large terminal building to call their own. The 1990s and 2000s brought steady growth, including a rebuilt domestic terminal and a separate international terminal that opened in 2010.
New Chitose is now the gateway to Hokkaido for summer travel and for one of the world's best known ski markets. The Tokyo Haneda to Sapporo route is usually one of the busiest air routes on earth by passenger numbers. Winter brings the toughest test, since the airport clears some of the heaviest snowfall of any major airport, with crews and ploughs able to clear a runway in minutes.