Fort Lauderdale's airport opened in 1929 as Merle Fogg Field, named for a local pilot, on land that had once been a golf course. The Navy took it over in 1942 as a base for training torpedo bomber crews. It was from here that Flight 19 took off, the five Navy bombers that vanished over the Atlantic in December 1945. That mysterious disappearance created the Bermuda Triangle legend.
Broward County took back the field after the war ended and opened it to the airlines in 1953. International service and the name Fort Lauderdale Hollywood International followed in the 1960s. For decades it stood in nearby Miami's shadow, but that changed fast as budget airlines grew larger. Spirit Airlines built a large base here and moved its headquarters nearby, and JetBlue made Fort Lauderdale a focus city.
Southwest and Allegiant piled in too, pushing the busy airport past 30 million passengers a year before the pandemic hit hard. A long contested project to lengthen and raise the south runway over a busy highway and an active rail line finished in 2014. That finally gave the airport two runways able to handle full size jets on a very tight and crowded site.