I was reading this old Cecil column about busy airports, and just to get a more modern citation, I also looked up this wiki article. Atlanta consistently has the busiest airport whenever I looked up this question. I’ve always wondered why. Its only 40th on the list of the most populous US cities and has less than 1 million people.
At first I thought it must be that Atlanta doesn’t have a lot of airports. Bigger cities like NY and Los Angeles split their air traffic between several large airports. Indeed, this wiki article about the busiest airport SYSTEMS has New York beating Atlanta with its 6 airports. But Atlanta’s still beats out Chicago’s 2 airports and Los Angeles’s 5. Its always puzzled me.
I have a theory, and I don’t know if its true, that Atlanta’s busy because of 2 things:
Surrounding airports aren’t equipped to handle the load so Atlanta serves more than just the immediate city but a larger region throughout the South. If you go back to the link on busiest airports, discounting Texas, there isn’t another southern airport on the list until you get to #11 Charlotte, then 4 airports in Florida represents the South, and you get to #31 St. Louis.
Maybe Atlanta serves as a hub for one or more major airlines, and because of its location (ie. not on the coasts), it also is a popular transfer destination. In other words, planes going from one area to another have to make a middle stop in Atlanta first, boosting up their air traffic
This is just idle speculation of course, I don’t really know why Atlanta’s so busy. It just seems kind of an outlier for traffic.
Both are true. It’s a regional hub for lots of airlines, and a primary hub for Delta (either the largest or second-largest airline depending on how you count it).
Lambert International Airport in St. Louis, for example, used to be much busier when it was a hub for TWA.
That airline would be Delta, which is the world’s second largest or largest airline depending on whether you count passengers or fleet size, respectively. So there’s that.
ETA: Missed it by that much! I’ll try to redeem myself that although Atlanta proper may only be the fortieth largest city in the country, the Atlanta metro area is the ninth largest, with over 5.2 million people.
It is a Hub for Delta. Also it is the in-between city, for travelers up and down the busy east coast. Convenient location for changing flights to other locations.
I’d point out that the Atlanta metro is the ninth-largest in the US. And that unlike the New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Philadelphia, or Boston MSAs (but like Dallas and Houston’s), the Atlanta MSA’s growth rate is over 20%. Those five metros I first mentioned have growth rates under 5%. Indeed, I believe the Houston metro is now more populous than Philadelphia’s.
Ah ha, so I was right in my random guessing! Thanks!
Though I am a little disappointed that the answer wasn’t more weird, like Atlanta makes the best airline peanuts in the world and airplanes often stop there to stock up, or that its secretly the easiest customs to go through for foreign drug mules.
To get a bit more specific, it’s a good transfer point if you are going to the west/southwest from the east coast (or vice versa).
I fly (and book flights for others) from DC to various US points quite a bit. If you transfer in Dallas or Houston during the summer months, you run the risk of being grounded by thunderstorms. I avoid booking people through places like Chicago or Denver during winter months as much as possible to dodge snow/ice. Atlanta is far less likely to have weather delays than those airports–plus it has a number of hotels close by if you do get stuck.
Apart from its use as a hub, an airport like Atlanta doesn’t just serve the incorporated city: you need to look at the metropolitan area’s population, and Atlanta is 9th on the list of metro areas in the U.S.
I don’t think enough people have mentioned that Atlanta is the ninth-largest metro area in the country
I think another factor in Atlanta’s airport being so busy is its wonderful seven-concourse layout, with some airlines’ slots getting scattered over as many as six of those concourses. So, you’ve got people scrambling for connections from concourse to concourse, trying to figure out why the concourses are lettered A, B, C, D, E, F, and…uh…T. Like Atlanta’s roadways, Hartsfield-Jackson International is a place where people are racing at you from all directions.
Well, if you’ve ever tried to fly into or out of any city east of the Mississippi, chances are, you had to stop in Atlanta. It’s one of the busiest because Atlanta is in between you and wherever you want to go.
Look, this thread is very informative, but there is one issue that I feel haven’t been dealt with properly: Concerning the size of Atlanta’s metro area, how does it rank compared to other metro areas in the US? Is it the 10th largest? The 8th? Or perhaps somewhere in between? My mind yearns to know.
Many folks have pointed out that Atlanta is currently the ninth largest metro area in the US, and presumably point this out as support for why Atlanta has the busiest airport.
But they may have cause and effect backwards here. Atlanta may be the ninth largest MSA BECAUSE they (we) have the busiest airport.
Atlanta has had held the title for busiest airport off and on since WWII. In the 50’s and 60’s, Atlanta chose to greatly expand the airport (and has continued to do so, even now). In 1960, Atlanta “competed” with other southern metro areas about half its size, like Birmingham, AL and Charlotte, NC. In 2010, Atlanta is now more like four times as large as those metro areas, experiencing much higher growth over that period.
While certainly many factors have contributed, many folks in these parts believe that the airport itself was a major factor in attracting business and commerce to the area, and the population growth followed.
Plus, Atlanta was a major transportation hub even before air travel. It sits at the extreme southern tip of the Appalachian mountain chain and was (and is) a terminal point for rail and road networks on both sides of the mountains. (One of the earlier names of the city was “Terminus” in fact.) Even today three Interstates intersect in the city (75, 86 and 20). So being a major air hub is just an expansion of its previous existence as a road and rail hub.
Indeed. Similarly, Chicago, which is usually right behind Atlanta in terms of busy air hubs, has been an important transportation hub for a long time. It is still a huge rail and highway hub.
I was thinking along those same lines too. Dallas/Fort Worth may be a similar situation. They built the largest airport in the world in terms of sheer area before it could be justified by the size of the metro are alone. Today, Dallas/Fort Worth/Arlington/Plano is one huge and sprawling city and it may be partially because they built such an amibitious airport that serves as American Airlines’ main hub.
The Atlanta airport also makes a lot more sense than, say, LAX. I’d never been to LAX before last week - we walked to the next concourse to see what they had there in terms of restaurants, and we had to go into a subterranean tunnel (not unusual) which was entirely deserted (unusual) and an employee asked us where we were going and followed us through it (wtf?) It also had signs about keeping together as a family, a blast door in the middle with a kill zone on the floor, and a door that warned us that in an emergency there would be CO2 coming out of it. It creeped us right the fuck out. And there was nobody around in the part of the airport we could even get to (which wasn’t most of it.)
In contrast, Atlanta might have that T thing, and you’re never on the same concourse unless you have 8 hours to burn, but it’s a way more pleasant airport. I don’t know if that has anything to do with the traffic to it, but it might.
