ATLANTA – Experts are projecting that air travel this holiday season will be at its busiest level in five years, which likely means a heavy crowd at the world’s busiest airport.
For the past twenty years, Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport had held the title of Busiest in the World.
Why?
First, there’s geography.
From Atlanta, you can reach 80-percent of the US population by plane in two hours or less.
“(Hartsfield-Jackson) has the advantage of being the only major airport within 300 miles that can get passengers basically anywhere domestically via a direct flight,” says airport spokesperson Alnissa Ruiz-Craig.
The folks at Hartsfield-Jackson point to the region’s booming economy as a driving force behind demand for air travel.
“The airport sits in a city that is the ninth largest metro area in the nation, and a southeast region that could be called the fifth largest economy if it was a country on its own,” says Ruiz-Craig.
And then, there’s Delta Airlines.
Delta moved its operations to Atlanta in 1941. It is consistently one of the busiest airlines in the world, with more than 180-million passengers each year.
It’s important to note that cities like New York and Chicago have more than one airport…while air travel here is focused on Hartsfield-Jackson.