Busiest flight corridors
 

Came across this map showing the busiest flight corridors in the world (TwistedSifter.com). I was just surprised that the East Asia is the busiest. Would have thought Europe would be busier. What do you say.
http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/membe...outes-2012.jpg

Interesting indeed.

But since the description of Travel News is

and there is neither news article nor link, I'll send this interesting statistic to Travel Buzz while leaving a 30-day re-direct in Travel News.

Thanks,

cblaisd
Moderator, Travel News

Europe and Japan have rail. In the US, DC, Philadelphia, New York, and Boston are connected by rail too, albeit not as fast as Europe or Japan.

Pairs like MEL-SYD and JNB-CPT are large centres with not much population density in between and not many other large urban options within short-haul flying distance. They both have rail connections but flying is the only sensible option.

It's not just that they have rail in Europe - it is much more multi-nodal.

+1

+1

Those two replys pretty much explain it.

According to the ITA Matrix, for the Jeju-Seoul route:

KE flies daily:

9 x 737
10 x 747


OZ flies daily:

18 x A320/A321
1 x A330

And according to wikipedia 5 other airlines fly the route.

Not bad for an island with just under 600,000 people.

Without looking, I would have guessed that the area over New York City is the busiest air corridor in the world. But I also would have guessed that the metric is total aircraft movements through some defined three-dimensional region of space, not passenger counts. (I also would suggest that it doesn't matter where all those planes are going or coming from....just that they're in the corridor for some period of time.)

But yeah, for a citypair passenger count list, I probably would have guessed Tokyo-Osaka as #1 with Beijing-Shanghai gaining ground fast. Would never have guessed that Korean route. Rio-Sao Paolo makes sense now that I see it, but it wouldn't have come to mind offhand.

I had heard for years Tokyo-Sapporo was the busiest air route. That one I understand since rail is gruelling trip for that journey, but Tokyo-Osaka is different in that you can take a Shinkansen train between the 2 cities in a little more than 2.5 hours (and generally at a cheaper price than a flight).

I realize density of population obviously affects how many flights per day there are between the 2 cities, but still, rail travel is taking the majority of the Osaka-Tokyo travellers.

Which explains why three of the ten routes are internal Japan?

But I think train fares for fast trains in Japan are very expensive. Airfares may be less.

Still, it seems odd.

PEK-HKG should be on this list because:

-SZX and CAN use the same route
and
-almost all flights between PEK and SE Asia do so as well

In total, we're talking about ~70 flights!

Makes sense... Didn't BCN/MAD used to make these top 10 air passenger count lists until they built a good fast nonstop train between the two?

The airspace over NYC is very busy, but it has no direct city pairing which is important.

With routes like SYD-MEL the frequency of the service is more like a bus time table, the 7:30am service is boarding whilst the 7:00am service is just leaving the gate. The smallest a/c they run on that route is a 737 and for that you typically need to go to VA, with QF mostly running 767's and a few A330.

There is also a daily B747 service (UA's LAX-SYD-MEL flight). They have even put an A380 on the route in the past to help with backlogs in the past. In the case of SYD-MEL both cities are considered our primary cities, they are both financial and business centers for this region. It is also possible to go from MEL-SYD for a day trip and still be home in time for dinner, plus it's relatively inexpensive given most flights have options for less than $100, so it can be cheaper than arranging a hotel in the other location. So I suspect there is a lot of business people who do exactly that which bolster the numbers.

Cool, thanks for sharing OP. The Amadeus article, source for the data behind the map, is a solid read as well. I would had never guessed LCC penetration in TH or PH was >60%. High but not that high

This *only* includes direct routing, for instance JFK-LHR, but not one who bought ORD-JFK-LHR. Also, city pairs EWR/JFK-LHR seems not to be included. Pretty useless statistics...

Could you post the link to that article. Thanks!