US: As Atlanta's airport grows, smaller airports lose passengers

Airports in large cities are gaining passengers — and smaller towns are losing them, a new report shows. Some smaller airports are shrinking in passenger traffic as large airports grow even larger, according to a new industry report by Airlines Council International. The world's airport "mega-hubs" such as Hartsfield Jackson-Atlanta International Airport grew 5.5% year-over-year in 2016, the World Airport Traffic Report shows. Atlanta's airport, the world's busiest in terms of passengers, continues to grow — though not as fast as hubs in Asia and other places around the globe. At the same time, the report found that 27.4% of small airports lost traffic over the last 10 years. That includes airports that started with fewer than 1m passengers 10 years ago. In Atlanta, Hartsfield-Jackson's passenger traffic has grown from 84.8m passengers in 2006 — the year it opened its fifth runway to boost the airport's capacity — to more than 104m passengers in 2016. That's a nearly 30% increase over the 10-year period. Despite gains for major city hubs, "the downside of airline capacity shifts is that a proportion of smaller regional airports have either stagnated or experienced a reduction in nonstop destinations between cities," said Angela Gittens, director general of ACI World and a former Hartsfield-Jackson general manager. Smaller airports have lost ground as carriers like Delta Air Lines reduce their fleet of smaller regional planes often used to serve smaller towns. Those efforts are aimed to increase efficiency by operating larger, more fuel-efficient jets that can handle more passengers per flight.<br/>