The World’s Busiest Airport Might Not Be What You Think—It Handles Over 100 Million Passengers Each Year

If you ask most people what they think the busiest airport in the world is during a trivia quiz, you would expect the most common answer to be perhaps Dubai, London Heathrow, New York’s JFK, LAX or even perhaps some of the other major European or Asian hubs.

Well for the 21st consecutive year the title of the worlds busiest airport goes to Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport. The hub in Georgia, United States of America saw a staggering 107 million passengers pass through its terminals in 2018 and for over two decades has held the title of the worlds busiest airport.

Hartsfield-Jackson is a hub for Delta Airlines, one of the world’s largest carriers.   Back in the 1980s U.S. carriers pushed a hub-and-spoke model. Pushing connecting traffic through large hubs in strategically located cities that saw less point-to-point demand, and where landing slots were cheaper. For example, at JFK and LAX, slots are tough to come by, also due to huge demand from international airlines around the world to fly into these heavily populated cities. 

Therefore, although many of the three major U.S. carriers now operate secondary hubs due to consolidation over the last few decades, American Airlines chose Dallas, Miami and Phoenix, United operate their large hubs out of San Francisco, Houston, Chicago and Newark, and Delta is strong in Atlanta and Minneapolis.

Atlanta is within a two-hour flight of 80% of the population in the United States and has meant that through connecting passengers here the airport has continued to grow in size year-on-year.

With five runways, Hartsfield-Jackson employs over 60,000 staff to keep the airfield serving 300,000 passengers each and every day. Interestingly, the airport hosts a 5k race on one of the runways each year. 

In 2008 there were 16 airports in the world that handled more than 40 million passengers a year, and by 2018 that number had risen to 54 airports.

The busiest airport in the world by international passengers was Dubai International Airport, which handled 89 million passengers in 2018 followed by London Heathrow and Hong Kong International.

The second busiest airport for overall passengers was Beijing’s Capital International which also handled over 100 million passengers, growing at 5.4% year-on-year as opposed to Atlanta’s growth rate of 3.3% annually.