Aviation arrived in Haiti under foreign boots. During the U.S. occupation that began in 1915, the Marine Corps stationed observation units flying Curtiss HS biplanes at what became Bowen Field, a small airstrip near the Baie de Port-au-Prince. In 1942, the Marines returned to build facilities for Douglas O-38 aircraft, used by the Haiti Air Corps to watch for German submarine activity in the Caribbean. Bowen Field handled mail service starting in 1943 and passenger flights by 1944, eventually passing to the civilian Compagnie Haitienne de Transports Aeriens in 1961. But the growing volume of traffic demanded something larger. In 1965, a new airport opened farther northeast on the Cul-de-Sac Plain, funded partly by U.S. grants and partly by Haitian taxes and lottery proceeds. It was named Francois Duvalier International Airport, after the dictator who built it. The old Bowen Field runway eventually became a street -- Avenue Haile Selassie.

Haitian airports change names the way Haitian governments change leaders. When Jean-Claude 'Baby Doc' Duvalier fled the country in 1986, the airport was stripped of his father's name and became simply Port-au-Prince International Airport. In 2003, President Jean-Bertrand Aristide renamed it again to honor Toussaint Louverture, the formerly enslaved man who led the Haitian Revolution and whose vision of a free Black republic remains the country's founding story. The name carried weight: Louverture had defeated the armies of France, Spain, and Britain before Napoleon's forces captured him. He died in a French prison in 1803, a year before Haiti declared independence. Naming the airport after him was an act of reclamation, tying the country's primary connection to the outside world to its most consequential act of defiance.

The 2010 earthquake badly damaged the airport, but it became a lifeline rather than a casualty -- relief flights poured in, and the overstretched facility handled traffic volumes it was never designed for. A repaired arrivals terminal opened in 2012. Then came July 2021: President Jovenel Moise was assassinated at his home, and the airport shut immediately, flights turned back mid-route. The most dramatic closure came in March 2024, when gangs attacked the airport alongside a massive jailbreak that emptied Port-au-Prince's prisons. Acting Prime Minister Ariel Henry, who was overseas at the time, found himself unable to return to his own country. Authorities nationalized the land around the perimeter and demolished 350 buildings to create a security buffer. The U.S. military flew cargo planes in with equipment for the Haitian National Police. Commercial flights finally resumed in May 2024, only to halt again that November after the Spirit Airlines shooting.

The facility itself is modest: a two-story concrete and glass international terminal, a smaller domestic terminal named after former Justice Minister Guy Malary, three jet bridges that mostly go unused while passengers walk to planes via mobile stairs, and ramp space for twelve aircraft. Plans to expand to fourteen gates and build a proper taxiway -- taxiing aircraft currently use the active runway to reach their takeoff position -- have stalled alongside everything else in Haiti. Yet Toussaint Louverture airport persists. On June 12, 2025, a domestic Sunrise Airways flight departed for Cap-Haitien, the first commercial operation since the latest closure. By November 2025, flights were suspended again after a Sunrise aircraft was hit by bullets while taxiing. The pattern has become almost predictable: violence closes the airport, a period of fragile calm reopens it, and then violence closes it again. Each reopening is smaller than the last, the list of airlines willing to serve Port-au-Prince growing shorter with every gunshot.