Memphis Airport

If you love cargo aircraft, you can’t get around Memphis. Here in southwestern Tennessee, FedEx Express has its worldwide hub – the superhub through which the group’s express network has run since 1973. By day, the airport, with its just under five million passengers a year, seems almost provincial. But when a cargo wave sets in, MD-11s, Boeing 777Fs, 767Fs and Airbus A300s roll across the runways in a density you won’t experience anywhere else. The airport now carries the name of the FedEx founder: Frederick W. Smith International Airport.

From city airfield to cargo hub

The airport opened on June 14, 1929, as Memphis Municipal Airport on open land southeast of the city. After World War II, the Air National Guard moved in in 1946 and still has its own area on the grounds today. In June 1963 came a new terminal for the jet age, designed by the local architecture firm Mann & Harrover – it is considered Roy Harrover’s best-known work. At the same time the airport was called Memphis Metropolitan Airport, then from 1969 Memphis International Airport.

The decisive turning point came in 1973. The young entrepreneur Frederick W. Smith moved his company Federal Express from Little Rock, Arkansas, to Memphis. On the night of April 17, 1973, the express service began operating: 14 small Dassault Falcon 20 jets connected 25 cities, and according to available figures, just 186 packages were on the move that first night. The idea behind it was radically simple – all shipments fly to Memphis first, get re-sorted there in one night and fly on to their destination. In 1981, FedEx officially opened the superhub.

The small Falcon fleet grew into one of the world’s largest cargo fleets, and Memphis grew with it. From 1992 to 2009, the airport was the world’s busiest for cargo. In 2010 Hong Kong passed it; since then Memphis has hovered near the top, and in the Covid year 2020 it briefly led again. In 1999, UPS, a second big express provider, arrived and operates a regional hub in Memphis – its worldwide hub, however, is at Louisville Airport.

Rise and end of the passenger hub

For a long time, Memphis was a connecting hub for passengers, too. In 1985 Republic Airlines built the airport up into a hub, and after the merger with Northwest, from 1986 Northwest Airlines continued the hub. According to the airport’s history, Memphis counted about 11.8 million passengers in 2000.

With the takeover of Northwest by Delta Air Lines, Memphis lost its special role. Delta shifted connecting traffic to its own hubs, above all Atlanta Airport, and closed the hub in Memphis in September 2013. Passenger numbers fell sharply: from eleven million in 2007 to about four million ten years later. In 2025 it was about 4.75 million according to the available figures.

The airport responded by downsizing: instead of maintaining three concourses, the airport authority had Concourse B modernized and consolidated passenger traffic there. The work was completed in February 2022. How a hub airport differs from a point-to-point airport is explained in the article on hub-and-spoke and point-to-point – Memphis has experienced both roles.

Runways and runway direction in use

The layout is easy to grasp. Three parallel runways run north–south, plus a crosswind runway in an east–west direction.

The longest runway 18C/36C was rebuilt around the year 2000 and brought to its present length after a third parallel runway opened in 1997. According to spotter guides, most of the time traffic uses the north–south runways. The crosswind runway 9/27 comes into play mainly when many FedEx aircraft arrive at the same time during peak periods. Whether takeoffs and landings are currently to the north (36) or south (18) depends on the wind, as everywhere. For the basics, see the article Understanding the runway direction in use at an airport; how designations like 18C come about is explained in the article on runway designations.

The FedEx superhub: how wave operations work

The heart of the airport is the FedEx World Hub. According to available figures, the sorting facility can process up to 484,000 shipments per hour, and about 250 FedEx flights a day are connected to the hub. The process follows a fixed rhythm: first the aircraft from the whole network land in quick succession, then everything is re-sorted, then the aircraft take off again – fully loaded with shipments for their destination region.

For you as a spotter, that means: Memphis is not an airport with steady continuous operations. There are phases in which one freighter after another crosses the threshold, and phases in which hardly anything moves on the runways. Spotter guides roughly describe four peaks a day, each moving about 100 to 120 aircraft:

• Night wave, arrivals: roughly from 10 p.m. to shortly after midnight
• Night wave, departures: in the second half of the night until the early morning hours
• Day wave, arrivals: roughly from 8 a.m. into the early afternoon
• Day wave, departures: in the afternoon

These times are guidelines, not schedule data – FedEx keeps adjusting its operations. The most reliable way to check the current situation is a flight tracker, for example by watching for flights with the FedEx code. How to set that up is covered in the article on flight tracking with ADS-B. You may know the principle of bundled arrival and departure waves from passenger hubs; the article on hub waves and banking explains the logic behind it.

The FedEx fleet: what you see in Memphis

In Memphis you get practically the entire large fleet of FedEx Express in front of your lens. According to the sources reviewed (as of May 2026), the main fleet is made up as follows:

The MD-11 is the main reason for many spotters to travel to Memphis. In November 2025, FedEx temporarily grounded its MD-11Fs after an MD-11 of UPS Airlines crashed in Louisville. From May 2026, the aircraft returned to service step by step after the required inspections. FedEx plans to retire the remaining aircraft by 2032. Their predecessor, the DC-10 in its converted MD-10 version, shaped Memphis for decades but is no longer part of the current fleet.

If you want to tell the freighters apart, you’ll find help in the article Recognizing cargo aircraft. For the classic pair that gets mixed up, there is the article Telling the Boeing 757 and 767 apart.

FedEx Feeder: the small feeders

Besides the jets, FedEx operates its own feeder fleet with FedEx Feeder, whose flights are performed by contract partners. These include the Cessna 208 Caravan in the Super Cargomaster freighter version, the Cessna 408 SkyCourier, the ATR 72-600F and older ATR 72s and ATR 42s as freighters. These aircraft connect smaller towns with the sorting centers. Which of them you see in Memphis depends on the respective network – but they’re worth a look because they fly in the same livery as the big jets.

Passenger traffic and other users

Apart from cargo, passenger traffic in Memphis is manageable and largely focused on the US. According to the sources reviewed, Southwest Airlines, Delta Air Lines, American Airlines and United Airlines fly here along with their regional partners, plus the low-cost and leisure airlines Allegiant Air, Frontier Airlines and Breeze Airways. The only international connection according to the sources reviewed is a seasonal route by Viva Aerobus to Cancún; Southern Airways Express also offers regional flights. Destinations and frequencies change with every schedule; treat the list as a snapshot.

Among the passenger jets, narrowbodies such as the Southwest Boeing 737 and regional jets of the big network airlines dominate. For spotters, this part of the traffic is more of a sideshow – it gets exciting when a passenger jet taxis to the runway right next to a waiting MD-11.

The Memphis Air National Guard Base is also on the airport grounds. The 164th Airlift Wing of the Tennessee Air National Guard has flown the Boeing C-17 Globemaster III there since 2013. With a bit of luck you catch one of the gray transports in the pattern or on training flights. General aviation traffic with business jets comes on top of that.

Spotting in Memphis: parking garages and approach paths

There is no official visitor park in Memphis. The spotter scene therefore uses what is possible around the terminal and at the fence. The information on this comes from spotter guides and field reports and may change – check the situation on site.

• Parking garages at the terminal: From the upper levels of the garages you look at the parallel runways and see the FedEx arrivals and departures on 18R/36L, 18C/36C and 18L/36R. Spotter guides recommend above all the top level of the eastern garage, because the view there is less blocked by ground equipment and buildings; according to spotters, the first 30 minutes there are free. Restrooms and food are in the terminal.
• South of the airport: On Nellie Road, spotter guides name a popular spot for takeoffs on 18R and landings on 36L. Many roads around the airport have no-parking signs – park properly and keep a low profile.
• On approach to 27: When the crosswind runway is used, spotter guides name Airport Center Lane east of the airport under the approach lights of 27.

Several other locations that appear in older guides are on private property, such as at company parking lots. There you will quickly be sent away by security staff. Spotter guides also recommend contacting the airport police beforehand, since photographers at the fence are not familiar everywhere. Which rules apply in the US in general is covered in the article Plane spotting in the US; for ladders and tripods at the fence there is the article Ladders, step stools and tripods at the airport fence.

Light, weather and night photography

Because the main runways lie in a north–south direction, the sun moves over the course of the day from one side of the runways to the other. If you stand on the east side in the morning, you have the light behind you; from the afternoon you switch to the west side. Spotter guides describe exactly this pattern for the parking garages, too: east side in the morning, west side in the afternoon. How to plan the sun position in advance at your desk is shown in the article on the sun position at the photo spot.

Memphis has hot, humid summers. Over the long runways the air then shimmers strongly, and heavy freighters need more runway in the heat – takeoffs lift off later than you are used to from winter. You’ll find tips against shimmer in the article Avoiding heat shimmer.

Because a large part of the FedEx traffic happens at night, night photography is especially worthwhile here. With a tripod and long exposure, taking-off MD-11s and 777Fs become light trails over the apron, and atmospheric pictures emerge at the lit positions. How that works is covered in the article Photographing aircraft at night; which lights you see in the dark is explained in the article Recognizing aircraft at night.

Getting there and orientation

The airport lies about eleven kilometers southeast of downtown Memphis, not far from the border with the state of Mississippi. The FedEx area takes up a large part of the grounds. Public transit connects the airport with bus lines, but for the locations at the fence you practically need a car.

According to the sources reviewed, there are no nonstop flights from Europe to Memphis. Most spotters travel via a major hub and combine Memphis with other airports in the southeastern US. You’ll find notes on rental cars, entry and route planning in the article A plane spotting trip to the US.

Memphis compared with other cargo hubs

Memphis is the prime example of an airport shaped by a single integrator. At Louisville Airport, UPS plays the same role with its Worldport – if you visit both, you see the two big US express networks in direct comparison. In Europe, Leipzig/Halle Airport with the DHL hub is the closest counterpart, UPS is strong with its European hub at Cologne Bonn Airport, and Liège Airport also lives largely off cargo.

In pure cargo volume, Memphis today competes mainly with Hong Kong Airport, which has mostly been ahead since 2010, and with Anchorage Airport, where many freighters make stopovers between Asia and North America. If you want to dig deeper into the express providers’ business model, read the article on the express integrators DHL, FedEx and UPS.

Conclusion

Memphis is not a beautiful airport in the classic sense, nor a place for airline variety. But it is unique: nowhere else do you see so many widebody freighters of a single airline, and nowhere is the MD-11 still as present as here. The new name Frederick W. Smith International Airport sums up what makes the airport what it is – it is the home of FedEx.

If you get into the rhythm of the waves, check light and runway direction in use beforehand and avoid private property, you’ll have a spotting experience in Memphis that can’t be compared with any European airport.