File Under "What A Great Country!" -- DIA -- January 21, 2024

Locator: 46612DFW.

Link here.

Denver International Airport. Wow.  

From the linked article:

Last year was Denver International Airport’s busiest on record.

While airline stocks have yet to fully recover to pre-pandemic levels, passengers have returned in droves — and millions of them are flying through the Colorado hub.

“We will end 2023 much higher than our forecast at about 78 million passengers annually,” said Phil Washington, CEO of the Denver International Airport. “So this has been tremendous growth.”

The airport, known as DIA to Colorado locals, opened in 1995. It was originally built to handle 50 million passengers per year, but now that number is expected to reach more than 100 million people per year by 2027, according to DIA estimates.

OAG, a global travel data provider, said Denver went from the 21st busiest airport in the world in 2019 to the sixth in 2023.

United Airlines is Denver’s biggest operator with 46.7% market share, followed by Southwest at 30.7% and Frontier Airlines at 9.7%, according to DIA.

The midcontinent airport has become United’s busiest hub. It recently invested nearly $1 billion in Denver to add more gates, flights and destinations, and opened the largest lounge in its network.

ATL: wiki rankings. ATL, DFW, DIA, ORD, DUBAI, LAX, Istanbul, Heathrow, Delhi, Paris, JFK, Las Vegas.

• Turkey: interestingly enough, has been the bridge between Asia and Europe since antiquity.
  

DIA: "much more than the projected 78 million passengers for 2023.

DFW: "projected to have 80 million travelers this year (2023)."

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DFW: 73.4 Million Passengers In 2022

Previously posted: link here.

What a great country. Unlikely faux environmentalists will slow this down.

Meanwhile, in the Dallas-Ft Worth area a huge expansion at DFW an a new airport north of the city:

DFW: from The WSJ --

Wiki:

Expansion: from my perspective, and I'm very biased, the DFW airport -- considering it's the second busiest / biggest airport in the world -- is an incredibly efficient and pleasant airport. 

It also has light rail -- which will please faux environmentalists -- connecting the airport, Dallas and Ft Worth.

The airport has always had plans for six terminals, cleverly called Terminals A - F. But Terminal F was never built ... until now.

Construction on a brand new Terminal F began this past summer (2023). My hunch: terminal F will be bigger than 99% of all publicly accessible airports in the US. In the US there are 5,170 airports open to the general public and 503 of them serve commercial flights. Fact check.