On 6 August 1921, the steamship SS Tantah arrived at Jeddah carrying aircraft, the first ever delivered to what would become Saudi Arabia. Later that month, six more arrived from Italy: four Caudron G.3 biplanes with Le Rhône engines and two Maurice Farman trainers. By September, a Caudron had been assembled in Jeddah and flew three short local flights. In October it crashed on takeoff from Taif and was left where it fell for repairs. During the Saudi conquest of Hejaz, Russian pilot Shirokov flew daily reconnaissance from Jeddah in a de Havilland DH.9 until his aircraft exploded in flight over Nejd in January 1925. In February 1937, an Italian metal hangar 170 feet long was shipped in from the steamship Alberto Treves; some of its parts were lost when a dhow sank carrying them ashore. It was erected anyway, and the airfield slowly became an airport.

By 1958, as the number of African hajj pilgrims flying in began to rise, Saudi Arabia built what was called the third city directly inside the airport. Five three-story buildings covered 9,652 square meters and housed 2,000 pilgrims at a time. Dormitory rooms slept anywhere from 10 to 36 people, with communal bathrooms and open-air latticework to let air and sound circulate. The buildings were plain, almost identical, deliberately designed to minimize social distinctions. The balconies were undivided. The architecture was repetitive. The goal was egalitarianism: rich pilgrims and poor pilgrims alike would sleep beside each other before climbing aboard buses to Mecca, 70 kilometers away. By 1979, upgrades allowed the complex to handle 30,000 pilgrims. Shops, banks, a mosque, and passport offices all operated inside the compound. For many pilgrims who had saved for years to make the Hajj, this plain dormitory beside the hangars was their first and last experience of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.

In 1952, the airport was officially inaugurated under Prince Saud bin Abdulaziz, and the Royal Saudi Air Force raised its flag over the first hangar. In 1953, Aéroport de Paris oversaw construction upgrades and the first civilian air traffic control tower in the country. Saudia (then Saudi Arabian Airlines) was founded there in 1945. By 1976, the airport handled 361,891 Hajj pilgrims in a single season, with arrivals peaking at 400 flights a day during Hajj compared to 120 flights the rest of the year. Lockheed Martin won a 650-million-dollar contract for a new air traffic control system; International Aeradio built a flight operations training center; navigation aids came from ITT, landing systems from Standard Elektrik Lorenz, radios from Rockwell Collins. By 1978, the airport was handling 17 aircraft an hour, 78 an hour during Hajj. That is a movement every 46 seconds.

The problem was geography. Kandara sat pressed between the neighborhoods of Al-Kandara and Al-Sharafiya, close to downtown Jeddah. There was nowhere to expand. Cargo could not be handled properly: it had to be brought ashore by helicopter. In the ten days before Hajj, the airport absorbed approximately 50,000 passengers a day, many of them elderly, non-Arabic-speaking, and making their first flight. Immigration and customs staff could not keep up. In 1974, Saudi authorities began planning a new airport to the north. Construction began in 1975. When King Abdulaziz International Airport opened on 31 May 1981, Jeddah's old airport ceased commercial operations within weeks. The old IATA code, JED, went to the new airport. The old airport received a temporary code, XZF, which nobody used.

Shortly after closure, a highway was laid across the former runways, its tarmac running through what had been the aircraft boneyard. Google Earth imagery from 2000 still showed the faded markings of runway 15R/33L, 9,843 feet long. By 2008, the original hangars from the 1930s had been demolished. The Hajj dormitories, where millions of pilgrims had once slept, were torn down in 2014, along with the deportation center that had stood beside them. As of 2025, three hangars remain, plus smaller support buildings. Much of the eastern apron now serves as a cricket ground for the city's South Asian expatriate workers. The southern portions of the main apron still exist, cracked and weathered. King Khalid Road runs where pilgrims once waited for buses to Mecca, and if you know where to look from the air, you can still trace the shape of an airport that, in its time, was the front door to the holiest city in Islam.