What are the world's busiest air routes?

Factual Questions
1

The other day I heard that Melbourne - Sydney is third busiest. What’s first and second? I’d guess New York - L.A, and maybe New York - Chicago?

2

Air routes is different from airports, but your question suggests that you’re interested in airports. So here it goes from http://www.airports.org/traffic/ . Data is from the year 2000. Sydney didn’t rank in the top 10 on any of them.

World’s busiest airports by number of passengers:
1 ATLANTA, GA (ATL)
2 CHICAGO, IL (ORD)
3 LOS ANGELES, CA (LAX)
4 LONDON, GB (LHR)
5 DALLAS/FT WORTH AIRPORT, TX (DFW)
6 TOKYO, JP (HND)
7 FRANKFURT, DE (FRA)
8 PARIS, FR (CDG)
9 SAN FRANCISCO, CA (SFO)
10 AMSTERDAM, NL (AMS)

World’s busiest airports by total cargo:
1 MEMPHIS, TN (MEM)
2 HONG KONG, CN (HKG)
3 LOS ANGELES, CA (LAX)
4 TOKYO, JP (NRT)
5 ANCHORAGE, AK** (ANC)
6 SEOUL, KR (SEL)
7 NEW YORK, NY (JFK)
8 FRANKFURT, DE (FRA)
9 SINGAPORE, SG (SIN)
10 MIAMI, FL (MIA)

World’s busiest airports by aircraft movement:
1 ATLANTA, GA (ATL)
2 CHICAGO, IL (ORD)
3 DALLAS/FT WORTH AIRPORT, TX (DFW)
4 PHOENIX, AZ (PHX)
5 LOS ANGELES, CA (LAX)
6 DETROIT, MI (DTW)
7 MINNEAPOLIS/ST PAUL, MN (MSP)
8 PARIS, FR (CDG)
9 MIAMI, FL (MIA)
10 LAS VEGAS, NV (LAS)

IIRC Atlanta is a conjunction point for many major air routes, which in part accounts for it’s high volume of traffic. Memphis is the home of Fedex.

3

I’d imagine (w/o doing the research) that the busiest routes would be business commuter routes such as Houston-Dallas, Washington-NYC, etc., where there are packed jets leaving every 30 minutes through a business day. Just a WAG.

4

http://www.virginblue.com

Check out the first article in BREAKING NEWS, it mentions it near the start.

I’ve also heard it in the news lately.

5

I thought the trans-Atlantic routes were the busiest because that is the first (and only, AFAIK) routes on which they introduced reduced vertical seperation between aircraft traveling in opposite directions. Above 30,000 feet, pressure altimeters start to become less senstive so the minimum altitude difference for planes traveling in opposite directions is raised from 1,000 to 2,000 feet. This obviously limits the number of flights since fewer altitudes are available. However, on certain trans-Atlantic routes, specially equipped planes can fly at the normal 1,000 foot seperation at all altitudes.

6

Here’s a thread from airliners.net message board on the subject:
http://www.airliners.net/discussions/general_aviation/read.main/457183/4/

The top 5 given there are:

The whole thing seems to be a bit confused though, because no one produces a single list that includes both domestic and international routes.

7

Air Route Info

It’s probably a fe wyears out of date, but I couldn’t find the most recent stats at http://www.icao.int/

  1. Hong Kong - Teipei
  2. London - Paris
  3. London - New York
  4. London - Dublin
  5. Kuala Lumpur - Singapore
  6. Honolulu - Tokyo
  7. London - Amsterdam
  8. Seoul - Tokyo
  9. Bangkok - Hong Kong
  10. Kong Kong - Tokyo

To be number three, the Sydney-Melbourne route wuold have to serve about 3 million passengers a year.

8

It’s late, please forgive the typos :slight_smile:

Kong Kong, indeed …

9

All I can give you are the top 1992 US air routes

  1. NY - LA: 2,904,060
  2. NY - Boston: 2,350,240
  3. NY - Chicago: 2,330,750
  4. NY - Washington: 2,282,480
  5. LA - SF: 2,153,360

I imagine NY - LA is up there, and London - Paris also there.