Pandemic impacted almost everything last year. The one industry that is most affected is apparently aviation. Most of the airports wear a deserted look most of the time in 2020. Amid this, Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport lost its title of being the world’s busiest airport to China. The airport in the biggest city in Georgia has now fallen to the second position in the list of busiest airports. According to a report of 2020 by Airports Council International World, a Chinese airport is on the top of the list now. As per the report, Guangzhou Bai Yun International Airport emerged as the busiest airport of 2020. It received the maximum number of passenger flights during the year when the coronavirus pandemic hit the world.
Reports suggest that Atlanta was on the top of the list for almost 22 years. But it lost around 61 percent of its passengers in 2020 when compared to the previous year. This downfall in passenger traffic was primarily because of the COVID-19 outbreak in 2020. “The coronavirus pandemic brought the movement of passengers to a virtual standstill last year. Most of the airports faced an existential threat,” said ACI World Director General Luis Felipe de Oliveira. Felipe said that the finding of the report suggests that the impact was uneven. “Different regions witnessed different challenges. They even required different policy decisions,” he said.
Atlanta saw the biggest fall in the number of passengers. ACI said that the airport received 42.9 million passengers last year. This was less than half of 110.5 million in 2019. Guangzhou too saw a decline in passenger numbers. But the Chinese city logged 43.7 million passengers last year. The airport was at 11the position in the 2019 list. It received 73.3 million passengers that year. ACI in the report said that passengers at the 10 busiest airports globally decreased by around 48 percent. Overall, the decline in the number of passengers was more than 65 percent.
