Tokyo Haneda Airport: Insect Cargo, a 48-Hour Eviction and a River Runway

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Tokyo's Haneda Airport opened on August 25, 1931, when the Postal Ministry turned a 53-hectare plot of reclaimed land beside a fishing town on Tokyo Bay into an airfield with a 300-meter strip. Its first flight carried live insects to Dairen in the Kwantung Leased Territory. Aviators had been landing on the bay's beaches at low tide because the main airfield, Tachikawa, was a military base about 35 kilometers from central Tokyo. In 1938 the city planned to replace Haneda with a 251-hectare island airport in Koto Ward, larger than Berlin's Tempelhof, but World War II halted the work and the site became a garbage landfill called Yumenoshima, Dream Island. After Japan's surrender, General Douglas MacArthur took over the field as Haneda Army Air Base and on September 21, 1945 gave more than 3,000 residents and the Anamori Inari Shrine 48 hours to leave so the runways could be lengthened to 1,650 and 2,100 meters.

Those runways suited the jet age. Part of the field returned to Japan in 1952 as Tokyo International Airport and the rest in 1958, and the 1964 Olympics brought the Tokyo Monorail. Narita opened in 1978 and Haneda became domestic only, with one exception: Taiwan's China Airlines stayed at Haneda while mainland Chinese carriers used Narita, keeping the two apart. A 1983 plan built new runways on landfill made from municipal garbage, and Terminal 1, nicknamed Big Bird, opened in 1993. In 2010 Terminal 3 and the D Runway opened, bringing round-the-clock operations and long-haul international flights back. Haneda handled 85.9 million passengers in 2024, third busiest in the world.

• Aircraft based at Haneda flew coal in the Berlin Airlift, and coal dust ruined many of their engines.
• During the Korean War, Haneda was the main regional hub for U.S. Navy flight nurses evacuating wounded troops.
• In the early 2000s Haneda ran daily "scheduled charters" to Gimpo in Seoul and later Hongqiao in Shanghai while regular international flights were still barred.
• Part of the D Runway sits on an elevated steel pier so the Tama River can flow underneath it and not flood upstream during typhoons.
• In 2022 an aviation analytics firm ranked Haneda the most on-time international airport in the world, at 90.3 percent, despite airspace boxed in by Yokota and Atsugi military zones, Narita traffic and central Tokyo.