The airport opened on April 19, 1927, after two years of construction on a flat patch of land in Dusseldorf-Lohausen, about 7 km north of downtown. SABENA inaugurated the first international route in 1929, linking Brussels and Antwerp to Dusseldorf and Hamburg. When World War II began in September 1939, civilian use ended and the military took over. Terminals A and B had to be completely reconstructed after the war - and while repairs continued, passengers were housed in big tents. From those canvas beginnings, the airport grew through the boom decades of the 1960s and 1970s, expanding terminal by terminal: Terminal B in 1973, Terminal A in 1977, Terminal C in 1986. By the 1990s it was Germany's third-busiest airport, with millions of passengers a year flowing through halls that, by modern standards, had not been built for what was coming.

The seventeen who died on April 11, 1996 are remembered at a memorial inside the rebuilt terminal. Most were ordinary travelers - arriving relatives, business passengers, airport employees ending their shift. The Air France lounge where many were trapped had no independent smoke detection. The ventilation system pulled smoke into spaces meant to be safe. The fire department needed hours to bring it under control, by which time two of the three terminals were structurally compromised. Terminal C, the least damaged, became the only operating terminal for years afterward. The investigation found cascading failures: combustible materials in concealed spaces, insufficient firewalls between zones, inadequate evacuation paths. The reconstruction that followed was not just architectural. It was a re-examination of how an airport should burn - and how it should refuse to.

Walk through the rebuilt airport today and the engineering of caution is everywhere - in the open sightlines, the redundant exits, the materials chosen for what they will not do in a fire. The most visible new element is the SkyTrain, a suspended monorail that quietly carries passengers between the terminal building and the InterCity train station 2.5 km away. Siemens built it based on the H-Bahn that has served Dortmund's university campus since the 1970s. The whole system glides at a maximum 50 km/h - unhurried, sealed, automatic. It replaced an inter-terminal bus service in 2002. The first Airbus A380 landed on November 12, 2006, a Lufthansa promotional flight; Terminal C's A380 gate has three jet-bridges, the only such stand at the airport. Today, more than 20 million passengers pass through annually, served by 70 airlines reaching 180 destinations on four continents.

The airport's recent history reads like an aviation industry case study. Lufthansa closed its long-haul base here in 2015. Air Berlin, once Dusseldorf's largest hub operator, collapsed into bankruptcy in October 2017, scuttling routes to the Caribbean and the United States. Eurowings - the low-cost Lufthansa subsidiary headquartered in Dusseldorf - stepped into much of the gap, taking over the Newark route and absorbing long-haul flying that had moved from Cologne. Ryanair came, opened a base, and closed it within a year. Singapore Airlines pulled out in 2020. Delta returned to Atlanta after the pandemic, then left again in 2024. Through all of it, the airport itself has kept growing - over 20 million passengers in 2024, fourth-busiest in Germany behind Frankfurt, Munich, and Berlin Brandenburg. Plans to extend the 3,000-meter runway to 3,600 meters remain blocked by Ratingen, the neighboring town under the approach path.