The world’s busiest airport: A 100-year journey

The story of Atlanta’s arguably most famous landmark will be on display this week as the airport marks 100 years since the signing of its lease on that abandoned racetrack site on April 16, 1925.

The Atlanta History Center and Gary Lee Super Design will this summer open an exhibit dedicated to the history in the pedestrian tunnel between Concourses D and E.

And all living former mayors will convene Tuesday to mark the occasion, as will family of the former mayors most credited with shepherding its growth: William Hartsfield and Maynard Jackson.

Credit: Charles Jackson Collection

Credit: Charles Jackson Collection

A failed racetrack

The Atlanta Speedway, a two-mile track built by Coca-Cola founder Asa Candler, went bankrupt after its inaugural season.

The site near Hapeville became home to air stunts and shows, which some future civic leaders, including soon-to-be City Alderman William Hartsfield, attended, said Spalding.

Simultaneously, a nascent airport system was growing across the U.S., and Hartsfield and others wanted Atlanta in the game.

As the city of Atlanta and Fulton County debated where a new airport might go, that Candler tract kept coming up; in 1925, then-Mayor Walter Sims signed the first lease with Candler for the property.

The airport went online just in time for the first airmail plane to land from Miami in the fall of 1926, after a lobbying campaign to secure the route from the federal government. At the time, aviation business was only airmail.

“This was something Atlanta does, time and again, just swinging for the fences,” McQuigg said.

A 1926 Constitution article ahead of the first flight read: “Business men are urged to send as many letters as possible in the first load of airmail.”

In 1934, President Franklin D. Roosevelt canceled and rebid all airmail contracts because of a corruption scandal, but it ended up being a pivotal moment for the airport we know today, he pointed out.

One of those rebid routes was operated by a Louisiana crop duster hoping to break into the industry: Delta Air Lines.

Credit: AJC

Credit: AJC

Into the jet age

As passenger air travel grew exponentially during the 20th century, so, too, did Atlanta’s airport. Hartsfield, Atlanta’s so-called “father of aviation,” oversaw much of it during his six mayoral terms.

Atlanta benefited from inherent geographic advantages, McQuigg said, with its mostly ice-free weather. It was — and still is — well-suited to reach much of the Eastern and Midwestern American population. State and city leaders successfully protested a federal effort to move Atlanta and Columbus into the Central Time Zone in 1941.

To accommodate the growth, Atlanta used leftover military materials from World War II to “cobble together” a bigger terminal and new runways, explained Spalding.

Credit: Floyd Jillson Photographs, Kennan Research Center at the Atlanta History Center

Credit: Floyd Jillson Photographs, Kennan Research Center at the Atlanta History Center

And by the 1950s, it was in “genuine competition” with Chicago for the busiest airport title, McQuigg said. In 1957, Atlanta first claimed the busiest airport in the world crown — but just between noon and 2 p.m. each day.

(The airport would claim and largely retain the “world’s busiest” title in 1998.)

Atlanta’s new “jet age” terminal opened in 1961 — the “largest single terminal in the country” at the time — but within its first year, it was already stretched past capacity.

Hartsfield died in 1971; a week later, the City Council renamed the airport the William B. Hartsfield Atlanta International Airport.

Credit: BILL WILSON / AJC FILE

Credit: BILL WILSON / AJC FILE

Maynard Jackson enters the picture

With the 1972 election of Atlanta’s first Black mayor, Maynard Jackson, the history of the airport changed forever.

Like his predecessors, Jackson believed the airport was key to Atlanta’s success, according to his widow Valerie Jackson in an interview with The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

He envisioned Atlanta as “a gateway to the world.”

“He didn’t want the airport just to be the best in the Southeast. He wanted it to be the best in the world, even back then, when the possibility of it being the best in the world was not that great,” she said. “He had big dreams.”

But as to how the airport would get there — with a new, larger terminal — he also had a big vision, tied into his determination to fix injustices he saw in city contracting.

Just 0.5% of municipal contracts were being awarded to Black people when he took office, despite the fact that the city’s population was 51% Black, she recalled.

Jackson’s Minority Business Enterprise program required 20-25% of contracts go to minority and women-owned businesses, she said, including the mega ones that would be needed for the airport project — the largest in state and city history.

In a later documentary, Maynard Jackson himself recalled that city staff told him a new terminal couldn’t be built because I-85 was in the way. “‘I said, ‘Fine, we’ll move the interstate.’ And they laughed at me.‘”

“Well I didn’t know a whole lot, but I knew never to say never,” he said.

Credit: AJC FILE

Credit: AJC FILE

The pushback

Jackson managed to get the federal government on board with moving the highway by teaming up with an unlikely ally: his former foe in the 1968 Senate race, Sen. Herman Talmadge, Valerie Jackson recalled.

But still, a legal fight over Jackson’s minority-owned contracting requirement froze the project for nearly two years. He didn’t budge.

“He used to say that grass would grow on the tarmac before he would start new construction if he didn’t have minority participation,” she said.

One favorite story dates to a moment when he fielded repeated protests from incumbent, white-owned firms that argued there were simply no qualified minority-owned firms to work with.

She said Jackson told them: “‘Gentlemen...I have observed that 75% of this airport is basically runways. And what is a runway but a long driveway? And let me tell you, gentlemen, we can do driveways!‘”

The airport terminal would be famously completed within budget and with 25% minority participation.

The FAA, he recalled in the documentary, told them Atlanta represented 89% of all affirmative action in American airports at the time. It inspired Congress to pass a federal minority contracting requirement across transportation funding in 1982.

And the effects in Atlanta have been wide reaching.

She recalled speaking an event and telling the story about the driveways.

Afterward, a man came up to her: “‘I just want to tell you that I was one of those people who had a small paving company and did driveways,‘” he said. Through the MBE program, he went on to work on three of the airport’s runways, he told her.

“I hear stories like that almost every day,” she said.

By the end of Jackson’s second term, metro Atlanta ranked as one of the top 10 areas in the country for Black-owned businesses, with more than double the total that were registered before he took office.

The airport gained Jackson’s name in 2003, after his death.

‘The expandable airport’

When the new terminal complex opened in 1980, it again claimed a superlative: the world’s largest air passenger terminal complex.

Its design, McQuigg said, has been a “secret to its success.”

By putting the terminal in the middle with parallel runways, the airport has been able to add runways, and add “concourses like building blocks,” connected by the Plane Train.

The city added Concourse E in 1994 ahead of the Olympics and the new international terminal and Concourse F in 2012.

It’s “a miracle and a testament to the good design of the midfield terminal that opened in 1980 that it’s still serving in that capacity,” McQuigg said.

In 2024, that terminal hosted 108 million passengers and is frenetically preparing to host 125 million by 2029.

Just as it has done for the last century, Atlanta is investing in its economic development magnet.

Hartsfield-Jackson is planning for $1 billion in upgrades and construction every year for the next decade, Frank Rucker, the airport’s senior deputy general manager of infrastructure, told contractors last month.

A top priority is doing so in a way that doesn’t disrupt the traffic — or the “world’s busiest” crown.

Simultaneously, in true Atlanta boosterism tradition, the airport plans to revel in its birthday, too.

Hartsfield-Jackson will celebrate its 100th year for 18 months: from now until September 2026, the anniversary of that first airmail flight.

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution has launched a series of stories to mark the 100th anniversaries of both Delta Air Lines and Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport. This is the latest story in the series.

Credit: Courtesy photo

Credit: Courtesy photo

Editor’s note: This story was corrected to reflect that William Hartsfield was not yet a city alderman when he attended aerial shows at the future airport site, as described by Bo Spalding.