Birmingham-Shuttlesworth International Airport — Birmingham, United States

Birmingham-Shuttlesworth International Airport serves Birmingham, Alabama's largest city, at an elevation of 650 feet with two runways handling the state's busiest commercial air traffic. The airport's full name honors Fred Shuttlesworth, a central figure in the American civil rights movement and one of the founders of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference alongside Martin Luther King Jr.; in recognition of his role in the city's civil rights history, the airport was renamed in his honor. Birmingham sits in north-central Alabama among the foothills of the Appalachian range, a setting that gave the city its early identity as a steel and iron manufacturing center, one still commemorated by a giant iron statue of Vulcan overlooking downtown from a nearby ridge. Today the airport mainly handles domestic connections, serving as Alabama's principal air gateway alongside smaller fields in Huntsville and Mobile. Travelers occasionally confuse this airport with the far larger Birmingham Airport in England, since both cities share the same name despite sitting on opposite sides of the Atlantic.