This is the world’s busiest airport, with more daily flights than most countries

Hartsfield–Jackson Atlanta International Airport is a different kind of busy. With thousands of flights every single day, this one airport outpaces entire national aviation networks. But how does it manage to have so many flights every day? Let’s find out what’s going on.

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Where is it

The airport is a short drive south of downtown Atlanta, Georgia. Some travelers & all pilots know it by its codes, which are ATL if you’re booking a ticket, KATL if you’re looking at air traffic maps. It has been the city’s gateway for decades & is built right into one of the biggest airline systems in the country.

How many flights move each day

The airport has more than 2,900 takeoffs & landings every day. Yes, daily. And when you compare that to many countries’ total daily air traffic, it’s clear that ATL is ahead by a long shot. John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York, for example, has around 1,200 flights each day.

Country totals that sit below one big airport’s day

Interestingly, some countries don’t even hit Atlanta’s daily flight count across their entire national systems. Iceland has only one airport, Keflavík International Airport, and it has only 104 flights a day. As for Dallas-Fort Worth, it has only 2,000 flights per day, while the second-busiest airport in the world, Dubai International Airport, has between 2,000 & 2,500 flights per day.

Planes depart roughly every 30 seconds during peaks

Morning pushes and late afternoon waves are when the airport really kicks into gear. Multiple departure runways work at once and allow jets to roll almost back-to-back without creating backups at the thresholds. During these busy moments, it’s common for controllers at ATL to clear departures about every 30 seconds.

The five-runway, east–west setup

To deal with so many flights, designers had to carefully plan the airport’s runways, and they went to five huge runways, all pointing east–west. Such a layout lets multiple planes come & go at the same time without stepping on each other’s paths. ATL squeezes every minute out of those runways.

Independent parallel approaches in use

Most airports can’t land big jets side by side on runways that close together. But Atlanta can. It uses something called PRM, which is essentially a fancy radar system, along with special approach rules. Two planes can come in at once, safely, even when visibility’s tricky. ATL is one of the few places where this happens regularly.

Delta’s hub

Delta’s home turf is Atlanta, and they’ve made sure their schedule runs like clockwork. Years ago, they reworked how flights connect, reducing the huge waves & raising the number of steady streams each day. This change helped increase their daily departures to over a thousand, while connecting to hundreds of destinations, without the usual chaos.

The underground train that feeds the gates

It’s not easy to walk through ATL from end to end as it’s gigantic. And beneath all that pavement, there’s a train called the Plane Train that takes people back & forth, linking every concourse and the terminal underground. Passengers can keep moving fast enough to make tight connections that would be impossible on foot.

The following sources were consulted in the preparation of this article: