I took this picture Saturday morning from our patio. The sky above our house often looks similar because we live fairly close to Brussels and Cologne which both have large international airports.
Turns out these travelers are taking off from Dusseldorf, Germany which also has a large international airport.
I couldn't help but wonder where all those people are going. The Dusseldorf airport handles about 19 million passengers every year. If there were an equal number every day that'd be over 52,000 people every day.
It may not surprise you that the busiest airport in the world is Atlanta - handling over 89 million passengers a year. That's over 240,000 every single day. That boggles my mind.
The second busiest airport is Beijing, China handling nearly 74 million each year which at over 200,000 per day is pretty busy!
The four largest airlines in the world are all from the United States. The closest foreign airline isn't really even close to having the number of flights and passengers. Delta, United, Southwest and American - in that order - are the world's largest. Combined, these airlines handled 544 million passengers last year (1.5 million daily).
FYI - Delta Airlines moved its headquarters to Atlanta, Georgia in 1941 - from Monroe, Louisiana.
I guess I shouldn't be surprised when I see pictures like this one.
This is a snapshot taken today at 10:23 EST of planes in flight over the U. S. at that moment. Can you even imagine being an air traffic controller?
I still don't know where they're all going, but it seems a lot of them are flying over our house - and according to that map, they're flying over yours too.
No comments:
Post a Comment