We all had that busy airport experience and we all love best of lists, so why not have a look at annual list of busiest airports!
Well the numbers comes from Airports Council International ACI , the only worldwide association of airports, who has 590 member airport authorities, which operate 1,850 airports in 173 countries. They usually give a preliminary report which you can access from their website and announce final results at the end of summer for the previous year. Their final results were based on 2,215 airports in 160 countries around the world. If you want even more detailed info on this statistics you can buy the reports in PDF and excel format, but like me if you only want to learn the juicy part for fun let me tell you.
Here are results summarized all according to the report,
–>Generally passenger traffic continued to grow around the globe, more than 6.7 billion passengers served in 2014, an increase of 5.7% over the previous year. And this increase is above the annual growth rate which is 4.3% for 2004 to 2014. It is somewhat unexpected considering 2014’s geopolitical risks. (2014 was the year with conflicts in Eastern Europe and Middle East and the Ebola outbreak which were great challenges for the aviation sector)
–>Atlanta is as usual the winner for the world’s busiest airport, like it did for the 17th year in a row. 96 million passengers passed through Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport in 2014. Compared to 2013 it is a 1.9% increase according to the report.
–>Second airport was Beijing Capital (86 million passengers) and third was London’s Heathrow Airport (73 million passengers).
–>Though list number was 6 for Dubai in 2014, in sense of international travellers Dubai was the busiest airport with 69.9 million passengers.
–>And once again Istanbul Ataturk remains as one of the fastest-growing airports among the world’s top 30 airports for passenger traffic. This year it showed a whooping +10.5% increase and moved from rank 13th from rank 18th.
–>By the way the world’s top 30 airport cities handle more than one-third of global passenger traffic.
–>The report also hold information regarding cargo category as well and Hong Kong was the winner like the last year with more than 4.4 million metric tons of cargo in 2014.
And here are some tables, in case you want to know all top ten…
