What it means
Sky Harbor is the airport. Not an airport: the one. Phoenix Sky Harbor International Airport, owned and run by the city of Phoenix, sits three miles east of downtown Phoenix and about nine miles from Old Town, and when anyone in Scottsdale says “I’m picking them up at the airport,” this is where they are going. Locals almost never say the full name and rarely say PHX out loud. You will hear “Sky Harbor,” “Terminal 4,” or just “the airport,” usually in a sentence about how long the 202 took.
The word matters because the Valley has three airports a visitor might confuse. The Scottsdale Airport is a business-jet field in the north with no scheduled airline flights, and Mesa Gateway is the low-cost-carrier airport out past Gilbert. Sky Harbor is the big one, the one with every major airline and the one your ticket almost certainly says.
How to get from the curb to your hotel, with the times and the costs, is in the airport-to-Scottsdale guide. This page is about the name.
Where you’ll meet it
On your boarding pass as PHX; on freeway signs along the 202, the 143 and I-10; in every rideshare app; and in the getting-around guide, which starts with it for a reason.
Where the word came from
The name is older than the city’s ownership. In November 1928 J. Parker Van Zandt, owner of Scenic Airways, bought farmland southeast of downtown Phoenix for his airline’s winter operations, built a hangar and a dirt runway, and called the place Sky Harbor. Commercial operations began on February 23, 1929. Why that name, nobody knows. Phoenix historian Michael Jones has said it is unclear whether Scenic intended to call all its airports Sky Harbor or simply liked the idea of a harbor for aircraft. The pilots of the day had their own name for a field surrounded by crops: “the farm.”
The stock market crash that autumn ended Van Zandt’s plans, and in 1935 the city of Phoenix bought the airport for $100,000, which its aviation director has since called a courageous decision to pay for a seven-year-old airport in the middle of farmland. The city kept the name, and through every expansion since, from propeller terminals to a two-terminal airport handling more than 50 million passengers a year, it has stayed Sky Harbor.
Locals use the code, PHX, mostly in writing and the name in speech, and the airport’s own marketing adds a third label, “America’s Friendliest Airport,” which nobody says out loud.
What it is not
Sky Harbor is not in Scottsdale, and it is not the Scottsdale Airport. The Scottsdale Airport and Airpark is a city-owned general-aviation field on the site of a 1942 Army flight school, and a rideshare quote to “Scottsdale Airport” for a commercial flight sends you to the wrong end of the Valley. Nor is Sky Harbor a hub for the light rail in the way a European airport might be: the train stops at the airport’s edge and never reaches Scottsdale.
The fine print
The terminal numbers confuse first-timers because they skip. Sky Harbor runs two terminals, 3 and 4. Terminal 1 closed decades ago, and Terminal 2 took its last flight on February 4, 2020, an Alaska Airlines departure, and was torn down. The numbers were never reused. Terminal 4 is the large one, where most major carriers land.
The PHX Sky Train ties the airport together. Its first stage opened on April 8, 2013, linking Terminal 4 with the 44th Street station, where Valley Metro light rail stops. The second phase, a roughly $700 million extension paid for with rental-car and passenger facility charges, opened in December 2022, carrying the train west past Terminal 3 to a new 24th Street station and the Rental Car Center. Since then the rental-car trip from the terminal is a train ride of under eight minutes, not a shuttle bus; older blog posts and some guides still describe the bus.
The traffic numbers: 46.3 million passengers in 2019, 21.9 million in the pandemic year of 2020, and a record 52.3 million in 2024, according to the airport’s own 90th-anniversary history. Driverless Waymo rides have served the airport since late 2022, first at the 44th Street station and later at the terminal curbs.