Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport

Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport (DFW) sprawls across the flat land between its two namesake cities and is one of the largest airports in the world by land area - bigger than the island of Manhattan. Opened in 1974 and built deliberately huge, with room to grow, it is the main hub of American Airlines and consistently among the busiest airports on the planet.

Its sheer size gives it a small-city scale: it has its own zip code, police and fire departments, and an internal train to shuttle passengers among its far-flung terminals, which are arranged as a string of semicircles to put gates close to the curb. Sitting in the fast-growing Dallas-Fort Worth metroplex, DFW has become a powerful engine of north Texas's economy and a major connecting point between the U.S., Latin America, and beyond.