Interesting stuff from Ask the Pilot:
Let’s return to last week’s list of the top-10 busiest airports in the world, measured by number of takeoffs and landings: Chicago O’Hare, Atlanta, Dallas, Los Angeles, Las Vegas, Houston Intercontinental, Denver, Phoenix, Philadelphia and Minneapolis-St. Paul. Notice that all 10 are in the United States. A number of e-mailers suspected the ranks were in error. Who would have thought that Philadelphia or Minneapolis would have more traffic than Tokyo, Frankfurt or London’s Heathrow? But they do. (Salt Lake City sees as many takeoffs and landings as Heathrow, transporting a third as many passengers. If you want to reduce commercial aviation’s carbon footprint, there’s a place to start.)
If you rejigger to account for total number of passengers, the top 10 is very different. Heathrow, for example, comes in at third place, with Tokyo’s Haneda, Paris’ Charles de Gaulle, Frankfurt and Amsterdam all checking in. Suddenly only five of the busiest airports are American.
This difference is a powerful illustration of how and why our air system is nearing perpetual gridlock. The problem isn’t too many people flying, but how many planes they are flying in. Our airlines sell frequency, or the illusion thereof, creating a system so immense, and so precarious, that a single thunderstorm throws the entire thing into paralysis.