Aviation A2Z is my favorite aviation blog (for aviation nerds, it’s definitely worth adding to your daily or weekly reading list), and they published a list of the top 10 busiest airlines in the world based on average daily flights as of December 2024.
| Airline | Average Daily Flights |
| 1. American Airlines | 5,994 |
| 2. Delta Air Lines | 4,819 |
| 3. United Airlines | 4,477 |
| 4. Southwest Airlines | 3,837 |
| 5. Ryanair | 2,480 |
| 6. IndiGo | 2,207 |
| 7. China Eastern Airlines | 2,173 |
| 8. China Southern Airlines | 2,053 |
| 9. Air China | 1,555 |
| 10. LATAM Airlines | 1,524 |
A few things surprised me about the top 10 busiest airlines:
- American Airlines is way busier than I expected. While I expected American Airlines to be first on the list, I didn’t expect them to have ~24.4% more daily flights than the second-place airline, Delta. Sadly for American Airlines, being busy doesn’t mean being more profitable — as of publishing, American Airlines has a market cap of $9.53 billion, compared to Delta at $42.78 billion, United at $35.41 billion, and Southwest at $19.87 billion.
- U.S.-based carriers take four of the top 10 spots. While I’m not surprised that U.S.-based carriers account for 40% of the top 10 busiest airlines (the U.S. is a large, relatively wealthy country), I didn’t expect the U.S. to take up all four of the top 10 spots.
- A few airlines that I expected to be on the list are missing. I thought Turkish Airlines, Emirates, and Qatar would all be on the this list. Turkish Airlines, for example, flies to more countries than any other airline in the world, and I thought that would help to put them in the top 10.
- I didn’t think LATAM had that many flights. LATAM was the biggest surprise to me, as I didn’t think they had that many daily flights. That said, LATAM had a record year last year, reporting an all-time high of 82 million passengers (growing 11% compared to 2023). If any Central or South American airline was going to make the top 10, I would have bet on Copa Airlines.
Bottom line
The U.S. dominates the list of the busiest airlines in the world, with American Airlines easily taking the gold. Notably absent from the list were Turkish Airlines, Emirates, and Qatar, with LATAM rounding out the top 10 after a record year.
2 comments
Copa’s fleet is less than a third of the size of Latam’s, and only has one hub in a small country vs Latam’s 4 hubs in some of the largest countries in South America. Latam has almost 200 flights a week between Sao Paulo and Rio alone.
Thanks, Dan! Yea, this was definitely a case of bias based on the flights I take the most (I fly through Panama about 8 times a year and the airport is always packed, almost entirely with Copa flights). Admittedly, I haven’t fly LATAM in a long-time, but LATAM especially makes sense because of all the intra-Brazil flights.