I hear often that Chicago has the world’s busiest airport. But how often do we hear of a mechanical failure there? And NYC has TWA 800 not too long ago, and now this. So now I’m thinking that I’ve heard that NYC has 3 large airports.
Collectively, does this make NYC the busiest air traffic city in the world? Is there any other city with as many takeoffs and landings? If so, have those cities had their share of mechanical faliures of aircraft?
Correction: Atlanta’s Hartsfield airport is now the busiest airport in the world for passenger jet traffic, not Chicago O’Hare.
NYC has 2 major airports within city limits. A third major airport is located in Newark (10 min away). There are also a bunch of small airfields in and around the NYC area.
I don’t think one airport could handle all the flights coming into and out of the city.
Let me simplify my question. Are there more takeoffs in NYC, including suburbs, than any other city in the world?
Including suburbs, there are four major airports that I can think of, JFK, LaGuardia, Newark and Westchester. I would not be surprised if all those combined were the busiest air traffic zone in the world, but I don’t know where to look it up.
Wait. There’s also two other respectably-sized commercial airports in the NYC vicinity: Stewart Airport (upstate) and MacArthur Airport (Long Island). Both are about 50ish miles from NYC – deep in the heart of what could credibly be called NYC’s suburbs. Your call as to whether they should be counted or not.
You can try to add up totals from stats at this site
http://www.airports.org/traffic/busiest.html
It depends upon whether you want to count passengers, tons of cargo, or just the number of takeoffs and landings.
Respectively the leaders in those categories worldwide are: Atlanta Hartsfield, Memphis, and Chicago O’Hare.
The two London airports combined had 44 million passengers in the first six months of the year. The Tokyo airports had about 39 million, but I don’t believe that Narita is in Tokyo.
Newark and JFK added up to about 31 million passengers. LaGuardia wasn’t in the top 30.
From Bureau of Transportation Statistics 31 Dec 2000 report. They conveniently break this info down by geographic area so you can crunch totals by ops, emplaned passengers, or cargo. Since you want to know about operations, we’ll use the departures table for major hubs (for the BTS, New York and Newark are two separate entities. I combined them here for comparison):
[ul][li]Chicago Area - 574,241[/li][li]New York/Newark area - 493,854[/li][li]Dallas/Fort Worth area - 450,243[/li][li]Atlanta Area - 417,903[/ul][/li]
Regarding New York Airports, I doubt JFK, LaGuardia, or Newark would crack the top ten in operations. For comparison purposes, departure operations at the NYC airports:
[ul][li]JFK - 126,932[/li][li]LaGuardia - 134,577[/li][li]Newark - 230,854[/ul][/li]are more on par with
[ul][li]Pittsburg - 123,767[/li][li]Charlotte, NC - 138,381[/li][li]Cleveland - 134,796[/li][li]Detroit Metro - 228,023[/li][li]Minneapolis/St Paul - 224,956[/ul][/li]then with the bigboys of Atlanta, Chicago, and Dallas.
Much harder to answer. I will throw some numbers out but any statistician or probability expert will tear all of the following apart.
As far as determining accidents go, I didn’t find a spot that summarizes accidents by state. The NTSB has accident statistics here:
http://www.ntsb.gov/aviation/Stats.htm
Or you can go to their accident database here:
http://www.ntsb.gov/ntsb/query.asp#query_start
You’ll have to read each synopsis to determine origin of the aircraft as they are filed by location of the accident, not departure point. A quick look for the 2000 numbers of accidents involving commercial air carriers by state show:
New York, New Jersey - 6
Georgia - 4
Illinois - 3
Texas - 3
The following numbers are based on an assumption that all of the accidents that occured within these states’ borders involved flights originating in that state, a highly unlikely case. Those six crashes in New York could have been folks flying in from somewhere else or merely flying over on their way somewhere else.
Commercial accidents per comercial departures:
New York/New Jersey - 1 per 105,000 departures
Atlanta - 1 per 111,000 departures
Illinois - 1 per 172,000 departures
Texas - 1 per 321,000 departures
So for 2000, you might be able to say that it was three times more dangerous to fly in New York/New Jersey then in Texas.
Thank you, boxcar, that was exactly the kind of information I was looking for. Although, it ruins my hopes that there was some reason all this bad air-travel karma is centered around New York.