World's busiest airports revealed as 2021 sets air freight record

While some airports are recording huge numbers of returning passengers, others are still stuck in 2020. Photo / Phil Mosley, Unsplash

The rapid and uneven recovery of global airspace has been revealed in a new study.

Revealing the world's busiest 20 airports The Airports Council International (ACI) have combined insights from over 2600 airfields to show how demand for air travel and cargo has recovered at a rate that experts were not expecting or - in many cases - prepared for.

On Monday General Luis Felipe de Oliveira revealed the final data for the 2021 reporting period, and there were some surprising absences from the top 20 list.

"While some of the perennial busiest airport leaders have re-joined upper ranks, other regions struggle to recover leading to new entrants in the top 20," said Oliveira.

The Montreal-based organisation suggested that the biggest discrepancy was seen between areas which had lifted Covid-19 related health restrictions and those which continued to restrict travel.

During 2021 airports made back just over half of the passenger counts lost in 2020.

Global passenger numbers recovered to 4.6 billion passengers. Still 50.5 per cent of the 2019 total, 2021 saw a 28.3 per cent recovery on the year before. It was a great encouragement said de Oliveira, "with many countries taking steps towards the return of a certain normality."

However these passengers were not travelling the same routes as pre-pandemic.

Topping the list is Atlanta International ATL, which saw a 76 per cent increase on 2020, from 42.9 million to 75.7 million passenger movements a year. It climbed into first place, from second in last year's ACI report.

Last year's number 1, Guangzhou International CAN fell eight places and contracted by eight full per centage points, from 43.7 million passengers to just over 40.2 million in 2021.

A similar trend can be seen across the top ten, with East Asian airports having stabilised early in pandemic but struggling to grow in the face of recent local lockdowns, meanwhile US airports largely moved beyond Covid-19 restrictions and in fast recovery.

Similar trends can be seen elsewhere where travel restrictions have been dropped, like Turkey and Mexico.

Long-haul hubs, however, are still struggling to recover. Having become recognised as a popular, safe transit route for long haul passengers, Singapore's Changi Airport SHA recovered just 6.6 per cent in 2021 as significant volumes of long-distance travellers remain capped. Other top hubs like Doha's Hamad International DIA and Dubai DXB carried a fraction of their pre-pandemic passengers in 2021.

Cargo volumes for airfreight told a similar story, with the exception of Hong Kong.
Hong Kong International HKG saw passenger movements fall, due to strict ongoing restrictions on quarantine. However, it recovered 12.5 per cent of cargo volume on 2020, to 5 million metric tonnes.

Despite the lack of passengers, there was no shortage of planes flying internationally.

It was the second busiest year for air cargo in history according to IATA, whose records began in 1990.

2021 saw a record 125 million metric tonnes of freight shipped, which represents an increase of 4.5 per cent on 2019 pre-pandemic levels.

"The gain can be attributed to improved economic conditions that drove an increase in demand for consumer goods and pharmaceutical products (such as personal protective equipment and vaccines)," said the ACI.