Map - Toronto Pearson International Airport (Toronto Pearson International Airport)

Lester B. Pearson International Airport, commonly known as Toronto Pearson International Airport, is an international airport located in Mississauga, Ontario, Canada. It is the main airport serving Toronto, its metropolitan area, and the surrounding region known as the Golden Horseshoe. The airport is named in honour of Lester B. Pearson, who served as the 14th Prime minister of Canada and received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1957.

Toronto Pearson is located 22.5 km northwest of Downtown Toronto with the majority of the airport situated in Mississauga and a small portion of the airfield, along Silver Dart Drive north of Renforth Drive, extending into Toronto's western district of Etobicoke. It has five runways and two passenger terminals along with numerous cargo and maintenance facilities on a site that covers 4,613 acres.

It is the largest and busiest airport in Canada, handling 50.5 million passengers in 2019. As of 2019, it was the second-busiest international air passenger gateway in the Americas (behind John F. Kennedy International Airport) and the 30th-busiest airport in the world by passenger traffic.

Toronto Pearson is the primary hub for Air Canada. It also serves as a hub for WestJet, cargo airline FedEx Express, and as a base of operations for Air Transat and Sunwing Airlines. Toronto Pearson is operated by the Greater Toronto Airports Authority (GTAA) as part of Transport Canada's National Airports System, and is the largest airport in the world with facilities for United States border preclearance.

An extensive network of non-stop domestic flights is operated from Toronto Pearson by several airlines to all major and many secondary cities across all provinces and territories of Canada. Since 2014, over 75 airlines operated around 1,250 daily departures from the airport to more than 180 destinations across five continents.

In 1937, the Government of Canada agreed to support the building of two airports in the Toronto area. One site selected was on the Toronto Islands, which is the present-day Billy Bishop Toronto City Airport. The other site selected was an area northwest of Toronto near the town of Malton in what was then Toronto Township (which would later become Mississauga to avoid confusion with the nearby city of Toronto), which was originally intended to serve as an alternate to the downtown airport but instead would become its successor. The first scheduled passenger flight at the Malton Airport was a Trans-Canada Air Lines DC-3 that landed on August 29, 1939. Since Toronto has more than one airport, YTO is used for the area designation, while Pearson is coded YYZ, Billy Bishop Toronto City Airport is YTZ and Toronto/Buttonville Municipal Airport is YKZ. YZ was the code for the station in Malton, Ontario, where Pearson Airport is located and hence the IATA code for Pearson Airport is YYZ. The telegraph station in Toronto itself was coded TZ, which is why Toronto's smaller Billy Bishop Airport is coded YTZ.

During World War II, the Royal Canadian Air Force established a base at the airport as a component of the British Commonwealth Air Training Plan. RCAF Station Malton was home to several training schools and was in operation between 1940 and 1946.

In 1958, the municipal government of Toronto sold the Malton Airport to the Government of Canada, which subsequently changed the name of the facility to Toronto International Airport, under the management of Transport Canada. The airport was officially renamed Lester B. Pearson International Airport in 1984, in honour of Toronto-born Lester B. Pearson, the 14th prime minister of Canada and recipient of the 1957 Nobel Peace Prize. The Greater Toronto Airports Authority (GTAA) assumed management, operation, and control of the airport in 1996, and has used the name Toronto Pearson International Airport for the facility since the transition.