Atlanta’s airport is back in its own exclusive club — those that handle 100 million passengers in a year.
Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport announced Jan. 24 that it had seen 104.7 million passengers in 2023, a jump of 11.7 percent (or 10.9 million) over the 93.8 million served in the prior year.
No other airport has hit the nine-digit mark except ATL, the busiest in the world, which posted 110 million passengers in 2019 only to see traffic crater in the wake of the pandemic the following March. Beijing Capital Airport briefly flirted with the 100 million milestone, but has seen its traffic decline with the opening of a new airport in the Chinese capital and a general downturn in international traffic since the pandemic.
Atlanta eclipsing the threshold once again shows the robust recovery of air travel in the years after an unprecedented slowdown.
Delta Air Lines Inc., which accounted for 73 percent of the traffic, is back to posting significant profits, and more carriers are announcing international flights to the city, from SAS’s new flight to Copenhagen to Ethiopian Airlines’ nonstop connection to Addis Ababa.
Mayor Andre Dickens, who traveled to Ethiopia to take the inaugural flight back home last May, said the airport’s return to 100 million is a testament to Atlanta’s “resilience.”
“Hartsfield-Jackson’s stellar performance in 2023 is a testament to our city’s resilience and the Airport’s pivotal role in the economic recovery,” he said in a news release (the airport is a city-run entity). “Our continued growth in passenger and aircraft operations showcases Atlanta’s strength as a global transportation hub. We celebrate these accomplishments and look ahead to an even brighter future for the gold standard of airports.”
Balram “B” Bheodari, general manager, credited ATL’s team with enabling the recovery, which was driven, the airport said, by the “resurgence of domestic leisure travel.”
Operations, or takeoffs and landings, also increased to 775,818, a number that should land the city atop the world’s busiest airport rankings yet again.
Another bright spot was the increase in international passengers, which jumped 28.7 percent from last year to a record 12.8 million, exceeding the pre-pandemic total of 12.6 million in 2019.
Other global airlines operating at ATL now that were not here four years ago include: Copa Airlines and LATAM Airlines. Other domestic carriers like Frontier have added some international routes from the city, mainly to nearby tourism destinations in Mexico and the Caribbean.
