An airport detection method based on remote sensing images which combines the cascaded regional proposal network with the detection network is proposed. The regional proposal network is improved to get the airport proposal boxes with a high quality, and the loss function of the detection network is improved to increase the accuracy of the airport detection. In addition, the alternating optimization strategy is adopted to share the convolution layers between the two networks, and thus the airport detection time is greatly shortened. The results show that this proposed method can be used to accurately detect different types of airports under complex backgrounds with a high detection rate, a low false-alarm rate and short average processing time.