Look, I’m gonna be honest – I had zero idea there were different types of airports until my twelve-year-old niece threw me a curveball. She needed help with a school project about transportation. Easy, I thought. Airports? Simple. Planes land, people get off, planes take off. Done.
Except she kept asking follow-up questions and I kept saying “uh, let me get back to you on that.” Spent way too much time that evening going down rabbit holes. Turns out there’s actually a whole system here I’d never thought about.
The Big Commercial Ones
These are what you picture when someone says airport. JFK, LAX, O’Hare, Atlanta. The places where you spend twenty minutes in security, pay nine dollars for a mediocre coffee, and somehow still end up running to your gate because they changed it three times.
Everything about these airports is designed to move regular passengers around. The restaurants. The overpriced shops selling neck pillows. The lounges where business travelers nurse their free drinks. All of it exists because millions of people fly through every year.
What surprised me was how much variety there is. You’ve got these massive international hubs – like Atlanta handles something insane, over 90 million passengers a year. But then you’ve also got smaller regional airports that might only have a few flights a day. Both count as commercial service airports. Just different scales.
The small ones connect you to a bigger hub. The big ones connect you to basically anywhere on Earth.
Cargo Hubs – Where Your Amazon Packages Hang Out
This blew my mind a little. There are entire airports built around moving boxes instead of people. Louisville is basically UPS headquarters in the sky. Memphis is FedEx territory. These places come alive at night while most of us are sleeping.
Think about it: you order something at 11 PM and it’s at your door by noon the next day. Some poor package had to fly through a cargo hub to make that happen. Industrial loading equipment. Giant sorting facilities. Connections straight to trucks and trains. No food courts or gift shops needed.
I track packages sometimes when I’m bored (don’t judge) and seeing “departed Memphis 3:17 AM” suddenly made a lot more sense after I learned about this.
The Little Guys – General Aviation
Everything else falls into this bucket. Private planes. Corporate jets. Flight schools. That tiny airfield outside town where your neighbor’s uncle learned to fly. Medical helicopters. Crop dusters. It’s a catch-all for anything that’s not commercial airlines or major cargo operations.
Some of these are really barebones. Like, one runway and a shed. Others have pretty nice facilities for business folks who travel by private plane. But they all share something in common: no TSA lines, no gate assignments, no announcements about keeping your bag at your feet at all times.
Way more of these exist than I realized. Little airfields scattered everywhere serving pilots and local communities. You just don’t hear about them because there’s nothing newsworthy happening. Just people going about their business.
So Why Does This Matter?
Honestly? It probably doesn’t change your life to know this. But understanding the three types helped me see how everything connects:
- Commercial airports move people around
- Cargo airports move all the stuff we buy
- General aviation airports handle everything else – private pilots, business travel, flight training
Next time you’re stuck at O’Hare waiting for a delayed connection, just remember: somewhere across the country there’s a cargo hub making sure your online shopping arrives on time, and somewhere else there’s a tiny airfield where some retired guy is taking his Cessna out for a Sunday morning flight. Different airports for different needs.
My niece got an A on her project. I’m taking way more credit for that than I probably deserve.
