Manila's first commercial airfields appeared in the 1930s. The present airport dates to 1948, when operations moved to the current site south of the capital and it became Manila International Airport. A long international runway followed in the 1950s, and the airport grew with Philippine Airlines into the country's dominant gateway.
A modern terminal, today's Terminal 1, opened in 1981. Two years later the airport entered world headlines when opposition senator Benigno "Ninoy" Aquino Jr. was assassinated on its tarmac while returning from exile in 1983, an event that helped spark the People Power Revolution. The airport was renamed Ninoy Aquino International in his honor in 1987.
The Centennial Terminal 2 opened in 1999 as a Philippine Airlines base. The much larger Terminal 3 became a saga in itself: substantially completed in 2002, it sat largely idle through years of contract disputes and litigation before finally opening fully in 2008.
With two intersecting runways hemmed in by dense city, congestion became chronic as Cebu Pacific and AirAsia fueled a travel boom. In 2024 the government handed operations to the San Miguel-led New NAIA Infrastructure Corporation under a long-term concession, launching a sweeping modernization of terminals, taxiways, and passenger flow.