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Mapping Airways: World’s Flight Paths and Airports
There are up to 8,755 commercial flights in the air at any given time of day. These flights transport thousands of people (and millions of dollars worth of goods) around the world.
But where are these people and goods headed? This map from Adam Symington uses historical data from OpenFlights to visualize the world’s flight paths.
The graphic shows a comprehensive data set encompassing 67,663 different routes that connect 10,000 different airports across the globe.
A Note On the Data
The map uses an OpenFlights database provided by the third-party source that hasn’t been updated since June 2014.
Because of this, the data used for the graphic is of historical value only. However, this detailed map sparked our curiosity and got us wondering—what are some of the busiest aviation hubs around the world right now?
We did some digging, and here’s what we found.
Busiest Airports by Passengers
There are several ways to gauge an airport’s popularity. One way is to measure total passenger traffic throughout the year.
According to Airports Council International (ACI), eight of the top 10 busiest airports for passenger traffic in 2021 were in America. Here’s a look at the top 10 list, as of April 11, 2022:
| Rank | Airport | Country | Passenger Traffic (2021) |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Atlanta GA (ATL) |  US | 75,704,760 |
| 2 | Dallas/Fort Worth TX (DFW) | US | 62,465,756 |
| 3 | Denver CO (DEN) | US | 58,828,552 |
| 4 | Chicago IL (ORD) | US | 54,020,399 |
| 5 | (Read more...) |