The detection of airports using synthetic aperture radar (SAR) images has attracted considerable attention. Traditional methods locate airports by connecting pairs of line segments or directly applying saliency analysis to an entire SAR image. These methods are either time-consuming or can easily result in false detection. Considering these issues, a method using line segment grouping and saliency analysis is proposed in this letter. First, line segments are obtained via an improved line segment detector (LSD). After line segment grouping, airport support regions are extracted. Then, selective nonmaximum suppression is proposed to obtain potential airport regions. Finally, airport regions are located by false alarm control and saliency analysis. Experiments on large-scale SAR images prove that our proposed algorithm has a better performance and higher efficiency in airport detection compared with traditional methods.