The airfield was built in 1937 on a high plateau above the village of Maupertus-sur-Mer, on the windswept Cotentin coast east of Cherbourg. Its location - close to the great natural harbour, with a long flat run of land available for runways - made it valuable from the start. When the Germans occupied Cherbourg in June 1940, they took over the field. For four years it served as a Luftwaffe airfield, dispatching aircraft to harass Allied shipping in the Channel and defend the U-boat pens at nearby Saint-Nazaire and Lorient. In June 1944, when the Americans drove north up the peninsula in the Battle of Cherbourg, the airfield was overrun. It was then rebuilt by United States Army Air Forces engineers as Advanced Landing Ground A-15, one of dozens of temporary forward airfields scratched into Norman countryside to put fighter-bombers close to the front. P-47 Thunderbolts flew from A-15 against retreating German columns through the summer of 1944.

When the front moved east, the Americans moved on, and Maupertus reverted to French civilian use. In the post-war decades it served as Cherbourg's regional airport - never a major hub, never expected to be one, but useful for connecting the isolated northern Cotentin to Paris and the Channel Islands. The runway was paved and lengthened. A modest terminal building was constructed. Through the second half of the 20th century, the airport managed a thin schedule of flights to Paris Orly and Jersey, sometimes also to London Gatwick. The airlines came and went. Twin Jet served Jersey and Paris Orly. Chalair and Airlinair took on the Paris route in turn. Both eventually concluded that there was simply not enough demand from a town of 80,000 to keep the route profitable, especially against the competition of the direct train from Cherbourg to Paris Saint-Lazare in three and a half hours. By the late 2010s, scheduled commercial service had ceased.

Without scheduled flights, Cherbourg–Maupertus runs on general aviation. Private aircraft come and go from Britain, from the Channel Islands, from elsewhere in France. Air ambulance flights use the runway when needed. The French Air Force makes occasional use of the field. A small flying school operates from the apron. There is talk every few years of restoring scheduled service - to Paris, perhaps even to London - but nothing has come of it. The nearest functional airline airports are Caen–Carpiquet (LFRK), 118 kilometres southeast, and Rennes–Saint-Jacques, 241 kilometres to the southwest. For most travellers coming to Cherbourg from outside France, the ferry from Portsmouth or Poole or the train from Paris remain the practical routes. The airport runs on quiet days and louder ones, but it never gets crowded.

The exception is every five years on the anniversary of D-Day. In June 2019, for the 75th anniversary commemorations, Maupertus filled up. C-47 Skytrains and Douglas DC-3s - some of them the same airframes that dropped paratroopers over Sainte-Mère-Église on the night of 5-6 June 1944 - flew in from all over the United States and Europe. USAF MC-130J special operations transports and modern C-130 Hercules joined them. Together they staged commemorative paratroop drops over the original D-Day jump zones, with re-enactors in vintage 82nd and 101st Airborne uniforms hitting the silk over the same fields where John Steele had hung from the Sainte-Mère-Église church spire. American special operators jumped alongside French paratroopers. Veterans in their nineties watched from the ground - some of them men who had jumped from these same aircraft on the original night. The airport was full of olive-drab metal for a week, then empty again.

Tucked beside the terminal is a small memorial to Advanced Landing Ground A-15 and the American airmen who flew from this field in 1944. It is the kind of monument the Cotentin specializes in - modest, weather-stained, not overdone, paid for partly by veterans' associations and partly by the local commune. The names of the pilots who died here are on the stone. Across the road and down the lane, the village of Maupertus-sur-Mer goes about its quiet life of small farms and Channel views. Out on the airfield, the runway lights blink on and off. Sometimes a Cessna comes in to land. Sometimes nothing comes at all for hours. Eleven kilometres west, the great harbour of Cherbourg goes about its work - the ferries, the navy, the fishing boats - and the airport that once supplied the breakthrough across the peninsula keeps its old runway open just in case.