Hi there, I am a new editor for the Aviation Weblog. Currently the blog is mostly geared towards private pilots, and I've been brought on to provide a broader scope for this blog, namely commercial aviation. Just a little bit about myself: I am a 15 year old aviation enthusiast who also works as a part-time travel agent. I have my own blog called Aviation Lover, which can be found at aviationlover-vin2.blogspot.com. Be sure to follow that as well. Since I write about commercial aviation, and the travel industry, you can use me as a source of information. Be sure to post comments telling me what you think about my first post.
So that brings me to my first post, on why Atlanta is the world's busiest airport. Though many of our US readers know this already, people from other parts of the world probably don't; in fact, on aviation enthusiast sites like airliners.net, people question its position, as evidenced by the following topic: http://www.airliners.net/aviation-forums/general_aviation/read.main/4749878/#. And, those of you here in the US as well, must be curious as well, as to why Atlanta is the world's busiest airport. So without further ado, here are some basic facts about Atlanta airport, followed by the reasons.
Full Name: Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International
Passengers in 2009: 87,993,451
Terminals: 2 (1 future)
Concourses: 6
Runways: 5
Operations in 2009: 970, 235
Reasoning
1. Atlanta is a hub for two major airlines
It's true, both Delta Airlines (the world's largest airline) and Air Tran have their largest hubs in Atlanta. In 2008, Delta carried around 55 million passengers, and Air Tran around 20 million passengers through the airport.
2. It's a major connection point
Yes, Delta Airlines flows huge connections over Atlanta. The airport handles a large proportion of Delta's connections, and in recent years, it has been Atlanta or nowhere on Delta. Air Tran is much the same way; which leads to…..
3. Location Baby!!
Atlanta, as the following image shows(you have to paste it into your web browser), is perfectly located to handle connecting traffic to the Southeast and Florida. On the map, the red box is Atlanta, the brown Xs are major cities within a 3 hour flight of Atlanta, and the orange shading is the catchment area for which connections through Atlanta are convenient. note: X at bottom represents Miami. As you can see, there's a lot of Xs, and any two of those Xs can be connected effectively through Atlanta. And, if you look at the Xs outside the shaded region, there's a lot of passengers travelling from those airports to the shaded region, at least 100 million annually, and a good proportion of that flies through Atlanta. But all these flight connections can be supported because….
http://img383.imageshack.us/img383/4890/atldiagram.jpg
4. Atlanta has large O&D traffic numbers as well
With over 26,000,000 million O&D passengers in 2009, Atlanta was the US's fourth largest O&D airport system (all airports within 50 miles of city center), behind only New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago. And large O&D passenger numbers allow flights to run at profitable loadfactors. But the reason for large O&D numbers is….
5. Atlanta's economy is huge
At $300 billion in 2008, huge might be an understatement. Atlanta is a major regional business hub, and home to many major corporations, such as Coca-Cola. In fact, Atlanta ranks 17th in the world by GDP, and only Minneapolis, and Chicago have more Fortune 500 companies based in their cities. (all unofficial data). There are also plenty of tourists in Atlanta, and Ted Turner's media bemoth hails from there as well. The large economy means that more people will fly from the city…
The above factors, when taken as a whole, show why Atlanta is the world's busiest airport.
Atlanta Diagram: my own