World’s busiest airport gets £1bn revamp to cope with all the passengers | World | News
Having seen over 104 million people pass through its doors in 2023 alone, Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport is the busiest in the world by passenger traffic. In fact, it has been for the last 25 years.
This immense level of annual visits can be put down to the airport’s constant expansion, with five runways now occupying the airport, increasing the daily flight count above its counterparts. This means that the airport has a whopping 192 gates spread out across seven concourses.
In fact, the airport has recently began work on an upgrade to Concourse D, set to cost over £1billion, to make it even bigger.
Groundbreaking construction techniques are being utilised in order to minimise the work’s disruption to the airport, such as building modules remotely and transporting them to the site at scheduled times.
‘No one else has done what we are doing,’ program manager for the Atlanta airport ATLNext Capital Improvement Program Chris Rogers told WSP. ‘A project of this scale combining modular and typical stick build construction while keeping a concourse operational. It’s a total team effort’
The expansion is set to house more seating and accomodate larger aircraft, which will greatly help the over 2,100 arrivals and departures every single day. This has increased staggeringly from the 16 a day all the way back in 1930. These flights jet out to 225 domestic and international destinations all over the globe.
The airport is the main hub of Delta Air Lines, who have used the airport for over 90 years. Today the airline makes up nearly half of all flights entering and leaving the airport.
It has over 55,000 staff working in sectors varying from ground transportation to security, making it Georgia’s largest employer.
This many employees are needed in order to successfully cover all 4,700 of its acres, and the airport’s sheer size prompts many to utilise some of the on-site transportation facilities such as the aptly named Plane Train in order to travel between its terminals.
However, if one was to take these journeys by foot, they would see plenty of artwork which lines the walls of parts of the airport, such as a comprehensive history of Atlanta seen along the walking concourse between terminals B and C.
The airport has seen its fair share of history since its construction 97 years ago. In October 1940, it was declared a military airfield and the United States Army Air Forces used the airport to mainly house and service combat aircraft. This caused the airport to double in size and a record was set of over 1,700 takeoffs and landings in a single day.
Originally a racetrack owned by Asa Candler, who purchased Coca Cola off of its original creator in 1888 in order to make it a business, the airport hosts a 5km run on one of its runways every year with the slogan: ‘You’ve flown over it. You’ve driven under it. Now run on it.’
