Atlanta’s airport hasn’t quite returned fully to its pre-pandemic form, but it did host 75 million passengers in 2021, showing that air travel at what had long been the world’s busiest airport may finally be on the mend.
The statistic amounts to a 76 percent increase from the anomaly of just 42 million passengers during COVID-stricken 2020, when the bottom fell out of global air travel and Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport went from hosting 300,000 passengers per day to basically zero within a span of three weeks in March. That year, the airport in Guangzhou, China, became the first to dethrone Atlanta by passenger enplanements in two decades.
The 2021 total was still depressed substantially from 2019 pre-pandemic levels, when Hartsfield-Jackson hit a record 110.5 million passengers. Aircraft operations — takeoffs and landings — fell to 707,300, a decrease of nearly 200,000, or about 22 percent less than 2019.
International traffic originating and ending up in Atlanta, which many have predicted will be the last to fully recover given the uncertainty around foreign travel restrictions during the pandemic, stood at 5.6 million in 2021, less than half of the 12 million the airport processed in the last year prior to COVID-19’s arrival. It’s unclear yet whether Hartsfield-Jackson will regain its “world’s busiest airport” moniker — these numbers come from the airlines and have yet to be audited by trade groups like Airports Council International.
On the cargo side, however, came some good news: the airport processed a record total of 730,000 metric tons as it continued to welcome dedicated freighters that began service to Atlanta during the early days of the pandemic, when populations were locked down but goods liked personal protective gear still needed to move across borders.
Given its passenger prowess, Hartsfield-Jackson had previously relied more on so-called “belly cargo” in the hulls of passenger planes operated by the likes of Delta Air Lines and Southwest. That equation hasn’t completely changed — Delta is still the largest cargo carrier at the airport — but more European, Asian and Middle Eastern carriers have put dedicated planes on Atlanta routes in the last two years, even as the airport itself has continued to invest in its infrastructure for cargo handling.