London - The world's busiest airline city

Which is the world’s most active aviation centre?

London by a reasonable margin.

The combination of City, Gatwick, Heathrow, Luton and Stansted moved 168m passengers in 2023, is not a record sum, that being 179m in 2019, but still extremely impressive. Shanghai with Pudong and Hongqiao with 121m were the next best worldwide.  Next up for Europe in the pre-pandemic year, the two Paris airports managed 108m passengers.

The continued success of London not only is vital for the airport operators but very much so for the myriad of suppliers, some of which are shops and restaurants, but also behind the scene, such a catering, transport and other vital infrastructure suppliers. And the country.  Heathrow with four terminals claims to employ 70,000 people and the single runway two-terminal Gatwick operation 20,000.

The outlook for 2024 looks very positive with Heathrow reporting a remarkable 9.4% increase in passenger numbers for January.  It is predicting a record 81.4m.  A £38m profit was recorded for 2023, the first since 2019. Stansted kicked-off 2024 with another strong passenger performance to record the airport’s busiest ever January.  London City lags behind and could take some years to get back.

All the above figures gleaned from CAA statistics, the official totals not published until 21 March.

www.caa.co.uk/data-and-analysis

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READERS' COMMENT

All comments are filtered to exclude any excesses but the Editor does not have to agree with what is being said. 200 words maximum

David Starkie, United Kingdom

Why not include Farnborough and Biggin Hill? Non scheduled service passengers are included in other airport totals.