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I've seen a lot of lists of the most planes that go through airports, and passenger numbers, but that's presumably arrive/depart numbers.

What I'm after is what are the airports where the most passengers transit through the airport - ie fly in, don't leave the airport, and take off again, possibly from a different terminal.

As an example, Atlanta is I gather a big transit airport, as is Singapore or Dubai. However, Queenstown, New Zealand for example, people fly in and out of but do not normally transit, so presumably the numbers would be low.

A top 5/10/20 list would be ideal, or else a link to a database that records this information.

DavidRecallsMonica
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Mark Mayo
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1 Answers1

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Some airports report themselves how many transfer passengers they have (or at least what's the % of all passengers). E.g. Schiphol (AMS) had 71.053 million passengers in 2018, of which 36.6% were transfers, for a total of 26 million transited passengers. Heathrow claims a figure of 24 million transited passengers, 30% of its total.

According to the paper How to assess the percentage of transfer passengers at airports?, Atlanta had 65%-69% transfer passengers (in 2011), which is very high compared to other airports. Since it's already the largest passenger airport in the world with a total of 107 million passengers per year, it's probably safe to say it's also the world's top transited airport. (The few airports with a higher transfer percentage (DOH, AUH) have an overall number of passengers which is 3-4 times smaller.)

Glorfindel
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