Atlanta's Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport, the world's busiest in passenger volume for 22 years has lost the title for now, but with air traffic reviving, it's hoping to regain the honor.
A preliminary report from Airports Council International, which keeps tabs on such things, credited Atlanta with 42,918,685 passengers, just under Guangzhou, China's total of 43,760,427. Guangzhou, which ranked #11 in 2019 lost 40.5% of its traffic last year, while Atlanta lost 60.2%.
Many other airports had very steep losses. Madrid, Heathrow, Frankfurt, JFK and an airport in Thailand took the worst hits with losses of over 72% of traffic. Only one Top 50 airport had more traffic in 2020 than 2019, and that's only because it opened for the first time in September 2019.
Overall, air traffic declined so much that not one of the Top 50 in 2020 had totals that would have been on the 2019 Top 50 list. Tokyo Narita, #50 in 2019, had just under a million more passengers than 2020's #1.
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