Built in 1951, the airport was served in the 1950s by
Alaska Airlines,
Northwest Orient,
Pacific Northern Airlines and
Reeve Aleutian Airways, using aircraft ranging from
Douglas DC-3s to
Boeing 377s, and was also a refuelling stop for
Canadian Pacific Air Lines service to the Far East (one such aircraft being involved in a
1951 disappearance). From 1955 to 2011, the eastern end of the airport's southernmost runway connected to the
Kulis Air National Guard Base. By the mid-1980s the airport's nickname was "Crossroads of the World". Anchorage was a common stopover for passengers flying between Europe and East Asia, because
airspace in China, the Soviet Union and
Eastern Bloc countries was
off-limits and because the first generation of jets and widebody airliners did not have the range to fly non-stop across the Pacific Ocean. Carriers using Anchorage for this purpose included: •
Air France,
British Airways,
Iberia,
KLM,
Lufthansa,
Sabena,
Swissair and
Spantax all used Anchorage as a stopover point between Europe and the
Far East of Asia into the 1980s to 1991. •
Japan Airlines served Seattle through Anchorage in the early 1960s, and offered service through Anchorage to London, Paris, Amsterdam, Copenhagen, Düsseldorf, Hamburg, New York City & São Paulo from the 1960s until October 1991. Last JAL flight was JL438 on October 31, 1991,
Paris–Charles de Gaulle - Anchorage -
Tokyo–Narita. •
Korean Air used Anchorage as a stopover point for flights between Seoul and both Europe and the continental US in the 1980s. On September 1, 1983, one of these flights,
Flight 007 was shot down by a Soviet pilot who had mistaken it for a spy plane, after unintentionally violating Soviet airspace. •
Northwest Orient, the first airline to operate scheduled trans-Pacific service after
World War II, used
Elmendorf Field and later Anchorage International as a stopover for service between US points (Seattle, Chicago and Minneapolis at various times) and Tokyo as late as the mid-1970s. •
Scandinavian Airlines (SAS) began a transpolar flight from Copenhagen to Tokyo via Anchorage on February 24, 1957. In the mid-1980s airport officials knew that the then-new
Boeing 747-400, with a longer range than then-existing aircraft, would decrease stopovers. They did not expect that
Mikhail Gorbachev's
glasnost, towards the end of the
Cold War, would open Soviet airspace to flights, causing the decrease to occur sooner than planned. By 1988, 16 airline flights that had previously stopped in Anchorage—each bringing almost $80,000 in revenue to the state—instead flew nonstop over
Siberia. Most scheduled passenger service from Anchorage to Europe and Asia ceased in the early 1990s. Korean Air continued to serve Anchorage three times a week on a yearly scheduled basis until March 2005, which was reduced to three times a week only for the summer season in 2006.
China Airlines, the last Asian carrier to serve Anchorage on a regular basis, used Anchorage as an intermediate stop on its Taipei-New York route until 2011, when it rerouted these flights to stop in
Osaka. While a few charter passenger aircraft still stop at Anchorage on flights between Asia and the eastern United States, scheduled cargo carriers – which benefit from more volume and thus shorter route segments – continue to use Anchorage frequently.
Condor still uses the
Frankfurt-Anchorage route on a
Airbus A330neo. In the 1990s, Alaska Airlines and
Aeroflot operated services from Anchorage to several destinations in the
Russian Far East, including
Khabarovsk,
Magadan,
Petropavlovsk,
Vladivostok and
Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk. Alaska Airlines pulled out of these markets in 1998 due to insufficient demand, while the Aeroflot services were primarily intended as technical stops en route to Seattle and San Francisco and were cancelled once newer aircraft and nonstop flights became available.
Reeve Aleutian Airways,
Dalavia and
MAVIAL Magadan Airlines also offered service between Anchorage and the Russian Far East at various times, catering to
Kamchatka oil exploration and other niche markets. The airport was renamed in 2000 by the
Alaska Legislature to honor then long-standing
US Senator Ted Stevens. Stevens survived a crash at the airport in 1978 that killed his wife Ann. In October 2018, Alaska Governor
Bill Walker and
Heilongjiang Province Governor
Wang Wentao announced plans to connect Anchorage and
Harbin Taiping International Airport with year-round, nonstop flights as early as the summer of 2019. On November 30, 2018, the airport suffered minor damage and was temporarily closed following
a magnitude 7.0 earthquake in the area. In June 2019, American Airlines switched the Boeing 737-800 on their seasonal route to Phoenix with the
Airbus A321neo making them the first airline to use the A321neo at Anchorage. In January 2023, Delta replaced their Boeing 737-900 and 757-200 in favor of the A321neo for their route to Minneapolis-St. Paul. During the
COVID-19 pandemic, the airport was briefly the busiest in the United States due to sustained volume of cargo flights through Alaska while passenger travel sharply decreased at other American airports. Due to the
2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine and subsequent sanctions on airlines, commercial flights between Japan and Western Europe once again overfly Alaska in the eastbound direction. However, due to the advanced range of the airliners used for these flights, such as the
Airbus A350,
Boeing 777 and
Boeing 787 Dreamliner, the stopover in Anchorage is no longer needed and flights are operated nonstop. Some re-routed cargo flights do however stop in Anchorage, such as
Nippon Cargo Airlines Flight 51, which operates
Amsterdam -
Milan - Anchorage -
Tokyo four times weekly.
Southwest Airlines is slated to begin service to Anchorage for the first time on May 15, 2026, with flights from Denver and Las Vegas, the two biggest airports they operate on their network. ==Passenger traffic==