In 1946 the Virginia General Assembly created the Peninsula Airport Commission to build a regional airport for Newport News and Hampton. In 1947 the US War Asset Administration handed over 924 acres of Camp Patrick Henry - a World War II Army staging base named for the Virginia patriot - and the new field took the patriot's initials for its code: P-H-F, Patrick Henry Field. Airline service began in November 1949 on Piedmont and Capital Airlines. A 1951 fire damaged the passenger terminal. National Airlines arrived in 1955 with Lockheed L-188 Electras and by 1964 was flying everything it owned through PHF. Boeing 727s came in 1966 with National. Allegheny - later USAir - arrived the same year. By the mid-1970s the field handled jets from Boston, Hartford, Atlanta, Chicago O'Hare, and New York JFK, and US Customs facilities were added for international charters. A Nike missile defense base, N-85, still sits abandoned on the property from the 1950s and 1960s air defense network.

When Congress deregulated the airlines in 1978, PHF's named-airline service collapsed faster than almost anywhere else in the country. National pulled out the same year. Piedmont was gone by fall 1979. Allegheny replaced jet service with code-share commuter Beechcraft and Short 330 turboprops. The airport, which had renamed itself Patrick Henry International in 1975, led the nation in air service decline and faced severe financial difficulty. Charles J. Blankenship arrived as executive director in 1984 and turned it around with a strategic plan: develop the Patrick Henry Commerce Center business park alongside the airfield, market aggressively to air carriers, build the destination. By 1985 PHF was America's fastest-growing airport. They did it again in 1986. The airport finally adopted the Newport News/Williamsburg International name in 1990 - ten years after a committee first recommended the change.

AirTran started service to Atlanta in 1995 on McDonnell Douglas DC-9-30s. By 1999 the airline was running four daily nonstops from PHF to Atlanta - the single largest factor in the airport's late-1990s and 2000s recovery. Delta added MD-88 flights in 2011, then Airbus A320s. Frontier launched Denver service in 2010 with 128-seat A318s, scaling up within weeks to A319s and eventually A320s. Allegiant flew to Orlando Sanford until 2012. Concourse A opened in May 2010 with a full customs facility. A local contractor donated $50,000 in labor and materials to double the USO office. The airport was the first in the nation to attempt a sustainability program embedding green technology in every facet of operations. Then on March 9, 2012, AirTran ceased operations at PHF as part of its merger with Southwest - which was already serving nearby Norfolk International. Frontier was gone by January 2015. The decline that followed was nearly linear.

American Eagle now operates PHF's only scheduled passenger service, flying Canadair CRJ-700s and Embraer ERJ-145s on behalf of American Airlines. Avelo Airlines tried Orlando and Fort Lauderdale routes in 2022 and ended service April 16, 2023. Between 2022 and 2023 the airport reported $4.2 million in losses. A June 2024 report recommended the Peninsula Airport Commission stop trying to attract commercial air service and reorient toward attracting advanced aerospace research and development tenants - leveraging proximity to NASA Langley and the engineering corridor between Hampton and Williamsburg. The airport remains home to three fixed-base operators: Rick Aviation, Atlantic Aviation, and Orion Air Group, now Tempus Jets. Denbigh High School's Aviation Academy serves over 350 students inside the original passenger terminal. Amtrak now stops at the new Newport News Transportation Center 1.5 miles southwest, accessible via Bland Boulevard. The runways - 6,526 feet on 2-20 and 8,003 feet on 7-25, sharing the south boundary with York County - can still handle anything. The question is what they will.