Drawing on an original dataset, this chapter demonstrates the growing role airport infrastructures and their managing authorities have come to play in shaping airport politics that is, how, by whom and where airports are built, modernized and expanded. Yet they have received little attention in recent attempts to characterize and explain the transformations of global aviation politics. This chapter suggests focusing on airport companies as an attempt to characterize their long-term trajectories both in terms of their properties and in terms of their operating contexts. First it shows that airport companies have developed into full-blown economic actors, which enjoy greater levels of autonomy through the systematic accumulation of resources, the diversification of revenues, and new alliances with the global finance and consulting industry. Second, the chapter discusses the role of domestic regulatory reforms as the main driver for change in major European airport markets. Third, it demonstrates the extent to which the complex interplay between public and private ownership has shaped the rescaling of the territorial dimension of airport activities, thus explaining the limited impact of anti-airport campaigns over the long-term development of major European hubs. This chapter has larger practical and research implications in that it demonstrates the need to go beyond a functional and context-dependent approach to airport infrastructures and managing companies.