Asheville Regional opened in January 1961 with a 6,500-foot runway, replacing the older field closer to downtown. The terminal followed in June. The new airport sat near Fletcher, nine miles south of Asheville, in a valley that stayed below the worst of the mountain weather. Capital, Delta, and Piedmont all served the old field with DC-3s before the move; by 1976 United was flying nonstop 737s to Atlanta, Charleston, and Raleigh-Durham. The expansion of 1987-92 added an upper-level boarding area and jetways. Then in 2003 the second-level boarding area came back out and the airport reverted to ground-level boarding - a quirky reversal driven by changing operational economics in the regional airline business.

By 2010 the original runway was over fifty years old and no longer met current FAA design standards. Project SOAR - Significant Opportunity for Aviation in our Region - built a temporary parallel runway in December 2015, demolished and reconstructed the original, and brought the new runway 17/35 online on November 5, 2020. The magnetic compass heading had shifted enough over the decades that the runway needed a new number. The old 16/34 was retired; 17/35 is what current charts show. The terminal will outlive its replacement too: the entire passenger building is being demolished and rebuilt around active operations, a multi-year balancing act that began in August 2023.

Asheville handled 579,443 passengers in 2009. By 2019 the number reached 1,616,762. Then COVID-19 cratered traffic to 704,972 in 2020 - a 56% drop overnight. The rebound was extraordinary. 2021 doubled the COVID floor at 1.4 million. 2022 hit 1.8 million. 2023 set an all-time record of 2,246,411 passengers, up 22.2% over 2022. The pull was simple: Asheville the destination - mountains, breweries, Biltmore, the parkway - was suddenly a place a lot of people wanted to be. Allegiant Air made AVL a focus city, basing Airbus A320s and crews here and flying cheap nonstops to Florida, Vegas, and Phoenix.

The $400 million terminal expansion underway since 2023 will produce 280,000 square feet of new building - 150% larger than the old terminal - with twelve gates instead of seven and proper jet bridges replacing the manual stair-truck ramps still in use during construction. A new air traffic control tower, $55 million and 127 feet tall, is rising on the southwest edge of the field, expected to be commissioned in 2026. The state treasurer approved $175 million in bonds for the project. The full terminal completion is targeted for late 2027 to early 2028. For an airport built to handle a few hundred thousand passengers in the propeller era, the math of doubling the building while doubling the traffic is not trivial.

On October 6, 2017, a man named Michael Christopher Estes left a bag containing an improvised explosive device near the terminal entrance, set to detonate the next morning at 6 AM. Bomb-sniffing dogs found it. Estes pleaded guilty in January 2018 to unlawful possession of an explosive at an airport. Aviation incidents over the decades have generally been minor general-aviation crashes - a 2007 Cessna 182 that prompted false rumors Jay-Z was aboard, a 2019 small plane that crashed in an adjacent parking lot with all five aboard surviving, a 2023 Diamond DA-40 that landed safely on I-26 after engine failure. The pattern, even with the boom years, is a regional airport doing regional airport work, occasionally interrupted by something extraordinary.