Simanaitis Says
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COME FLY WITH ME
I SHARE FRANK SINATRA’S VOCAL ENTHUSIASM for air travel: “Once you get up there, where the air is rarified/ We’ll just glide, starry-eyed” being a particularly telling lyric. And thus I was also attracted to Maureen O’Hare’s “Which Country Flies The Most? Where Are People Going? And In Which Planes? 2024 Aviation Stats Revealed,” CNN, August 9, 2025.
Any Kin to Chicago’s O’Hare? By the way, I wondered whether Maureen was kin to WWII aviator Edward “Butch” O’Hare, the U.S. Navy’s first Medal of Honor recipient after whom Chicago’s Orchard Place Airport/Douglas Field was renamed in 1949. The airport’s ORD code evolved from Orchard.
Northern Ireland-born Maureen O’Hare is Senior Producer for CNN Travel. She’s based in London.
“Wow Your Avgeek Friends.” Maureen O’Hare certainly knows her audience: “The International Air Transport Association (IATA) has released its 2024 World Air Transport Statistics report, and it’s filled with fascinating nuggets.”
“The United States,” she recounts, “is the world’s biggest aviation market, with 876 million passengers per year in 2024, mostly flying domestic. That’s four times more than India, which is the world’s most populous nation and the fifth biggest aviation market. China is hot on the States’ heels at No. 2, however, with 741 million passengers in 2024 and a whopping 18.7% growth year-on-year, compared to America’s modest 5.2%.”
O’Hare continues, “The United Kingdom is but a 94,000-square-mile island nation, but it’s the world’s No. 3 aviation market, with 261 million passengers scooting above land and sea in 2024. A lot of those Brits will have been heading to vacation hot spot Spain, which is the No. 4 aviation market, with 241 million passengers last year.”
This and following image from IATA.
The Busiest Routes. O’Hare notes, “Nine out of 10 of the world’s busiest flight routes are in the Asia-Pacific region. However, the world’s No.1 is a South Korean domestic flight: the 1 hour and 15 minute trip between the island resort city of Jeju (CJU) and the capital, Seoul (GMP). More than 13 million passengers flew the route in 2024.”
“The busiest route in North America,” O’Hare reports, “is an airport pairing as classic as ketchup and hot dog. It’s JFK to LAX (or New York to Los Angeles, as if you didn’t know), and 2.2 million passengers made the voyage last year.”
She continues, “The most popular European route is the hour-long flight between Spanish vacation hot spots Barcelona (BCN) and Palma de Mallorca (PMI), with 2 million passengers in 2024. Want a less busy flight? Take a look at our guide to the parts of Spain that aren’t sick of tourists.”
Other Busy Routes: “The busiest route in Latin America (with 3.8 million passengers) is the one-hour flight between Bogotá (BOG), the Colombian capital, and Medellín (MDE), Colombia’s second-largest city. Africa’s most popular route, with 3.3 million passengers, is the two-hour domestic South African flight between Cape Town (CPT) and Johannesburg (JNB).”
Top Airport Pairs. As reported by the International Air Travel Association, “Asia Pacific dominated the ranking for the world’s busiest airport pairs, with Jeju-Seoul (CJU-GMP) the most popular route globally, with 13.2 million passengers flying between the two airports in 2024. In the top 10, only one airport pair—Jeddah-Riyadh (JED-RUH) —was not in the Asia Pacific region.” And, as noted above, even our busiest JFK/LAX pair hosted a mere 2.2 million in 2024.
Most Employed Aircraft. The IATA recounts, “Narrowbody aircraft from Boeing and Airbus were among the most used aircraft in 2024. Boeing 737 aircraft (including all variants) flew 10 million flights with 2.4 trillion Available Seat Kilometers (ASKs) in 2024. This was followed by the Airbus A320 with 7.9 million flights and 1.7 trillion ASKs and the Airbus A321 with 3.4 million flights and 1.1 trillion ASKs.”
Another Metric? Alas, my IATA research was unsuccessful in identifying another air travel extreme: “WRY/PPW—Welcome to Papa Westray.”
Papa Westray to Westray. Image from amusingplanet.com via SimanaitisSays.
As noted in SimanaitisSays, “From takeoff to landing, the flight distance is only 1.7 miles. To put this in perspective, each runway at London Heathrow is greater in length.” ds
© Dennis Simanaitis, SimanaitisSays.com, 2025
Simanaitis Says 
This is such cool data. It’s indicative of the rise of Asia, certainly. But the recent troubles of Boeing are put into pretty stark relief against 10 MILLION flights in a year. Not to say Boeing doesn’t have serious issues. The company is being eaten by its own C-suite – another sign of the times.