Hong Kong International Airport occupies an island that did not exist before the 1990s. Chek Lap Kok was flattened and fused with reclaimed seabed into a 12.5-square-kilometre platform off Lantau, and when the airport opened in July 1998 the whole operation moved from the old Kai Tak airport in a single night. Kai Tak's hair-raising checkerboard approach over Kowloon's rooftops passed into aviation legend; what replaced it became one of the busiest and most consequential airports on earth.

Its role is unusual. Hong Kong sits at the mouth of the Pearl River Delta, an hour from Shenzhen and Guangzhou, yet flies to neither — they are too close for aviation to make sense. Instead HKIA functions as the long-haul engine for the entire delta: SkyPier ferries and cross-boundary coaches feed passengers in from mainland cities, and Cathay Pacific's network carries them on to Europe, North America and Australia. The same geography made it the world's busiest cargo airport, a title it has held for most of the past two decades.

The airport is in the middle of its biggest expansion since opening. The Three-Runway System, completed in late 2024 on yet more reclaimed land, points capacity toward 120 million passengers a year, while Terminal 2 progressively reopens after its rebuild. Traffic recovered to around 53 million passengers in 2024 and continues to climb back toward — and beyond — its pre-2019 peak.