Air Cargo Volume by Airport

Four cataloged records carry airport-level cargo volume, and they divide cleanly by region, grain and measure.

ACI World Data Centre - Airport Traffic Statistics is the global league table: more than 2,600 airports in over 180 countries in the annual collection, about 1,200 airports in the monthly one, cargo tonnes recorded beside passengers and aircraft movements, with participation reaching up to 95% of global commercial air traffic. Ranked tables are preliminary in April and confirmed in July.

Eurostat AVIA_GOOA is the European workhorse: 17,791,958 observations at roughly 1,130 coded airports — Frankfurt, Schiphol, Charles de Gaulle and down the long tail — from 1993 through 2026-Q2, scored 10 out of 10 on Datadory's quality rubric.

BTS T-100 Air Carrier Statistics owns the United States: the combined segment table holds 14,083,343 records across 50 fields, monthly freight and mail pounds by carrier, airport pair, aircraft type and service class from 1990 through 2026.

UK CAA Aviation Data & Analysis rounds out the set with monthly freight-tonne and mail-tonne tables for every CAA reporting airport — roughly 50 to 60 per release — spanning 2015 through 2026 with scanned archives reaching back to 1973.

All four sit inside an 18-primary-dataset industry shelf; the air freight & logistics data hub ranks them and the ten best air freight & logistics datasets scores them side by side.

Row shape differs by product, which is exactly why joins fail when teams stitch raw pulls themselves. From the verified samples behind each record:

ACI (per airport per year)
rank  airport            cargo_tonnes
1     Hong Kong (HKG)    5,066,345

Eurostat AVIA_GOOA (airport x schedule x coverage x measure x period)
rep_airp   unit  tra_meas     schedule  period  obs_value_tonnes
NL_EHAM    T     FRM_LD_NLD   TOTAL     2024    1,498,313

BTS T-100 (carrier x origin x destination x aircraft x class x month)
carrier  origin  dest  aircraft  freight_lb  mail_lb  payload_lb  distance_mi
--       --      --    --        38,400      1,120    285,000     1,846

UK CAA (airport group x airport x span)
rpt_apt_grp_name     rpt_apt_name  span         yr_value_tonnes  pc_change
London Area Airports HEATHROW      2015 - 2025  1,549,027.26     16.0

Four grains, four key structures, one question answered. The ACI row is a ranking position; the Eurostat row is an airport-period cell inside a nine-field enum grid; the T-100 row is a single carrier flying a single aircraft type over a single segment in one month; the CAA row is an eleven-year span per airport. Every one of them arrives from Datadory typed to those shapes, so a multi-region table is a join instead of an archaeology project.

Three mismatches break naive merges, and all three are visible in the field dictionaries above.

Units. BTS T-100 records freight and mail in pounds; Eurostat and the UK CAA record tonnes. Rank a raw pound column against a tonne column and American hubs jump roughly threefold in apparent size. Datadory normalizes onto one declared basis before delivery, or ships both columns labeled — never a silent mix.

Scope. Eurostat and the UK CAA publish freight and mail together; T-100 separates them as distinct fields, and AVIA_GOOA's tra_meas axis further splits loaded from unloaded, on-board from transited. Decide whether your ranking is freight-only or freight-plus-mail before comparing a German hub with an American one; the same airport can shift several places either way.

Timing and suppression. Recent international route detail in the US ledger is withheld where individual routes are confidential, and Eurostat applies dissemination thresholds to commercially sensitive route-level detail. Annual rankings only firm up mid-year. Any cross-border table built on the newest quarters is provisional, so Datadory stamps every extract with its vintage and flags suppressed cells as gaps rather than zeros.

Six cataloged products publish airport-relevant cargo volume, and they separate more by grain than by quality — every primary record in this slice scores 7 or higher. The comparison lines them up as of August 2026.

The workflow that survives review uses four named products and one reference table:

Steps two through six are what a Datadory sample request returns pre-assembled: name the regions, years and grain, and the extract comes back shaped like the table you meant to build.

Every source draws a floor under which airports get named, and the floors differ — which is why small-field traffic is usually estimated rather than observed.

AVIA_GOOA covers main airports only, plus an aggregate bucket. Its national counterpart, Eurostat AVIA_GOOC, holds 2,568,489 observations by reporting country, so the gap between a country total and the sum of its main airports is the working estimate of traffic at smaller fields.

In the US, TranStats lists 1,485 airports while the snapshot rankings cover 763; smaller fields still appear in the T-100 records themselves, because certificated carriers report every served segment regardless of airport size. ACI's monthly collection reaches about 1,200 airports against 2,600-plus annually, so intra-year coverage thins sharply below the top tier. The UK CAA publishes every reporting airport, grouped as London Area Airports and Other UK Airports — the widest small-airport visibility of the four.

For discovery beyond these sets, Data.gov air cargo search results catalogs 14 curated US government entries matching the term out of roughly 552,000 indexed datasets — airport-specific cargo series among them — useful for spotting a niche series before commissioning a custom pull.

Market researchers & consultants size hub catchments and rank regional gateways on one comparable measure instead of reconciling four statistical offices by hand. Investors & quants regress throughput against rate indices — WorldACD contributes weekly chargeable weight, yield and load-factor aggregates pooled from more than 100 contributing airlines and forwarders across 15,000+ forwarders and 14 product categories, while TAC Index maintains 100-plus timestamped lane benchmarks — turning volume into price exposure.

Two companions extend the picture past the airport fence: Freight Analysis Framework Version 5 (FAF5) links air to SCTG2 commodities across roughly 132 US FAF zones with forecasts to 2050, and BTS T-100 carries the carrier ledger underneath every tonne. For the distance-weighted macro view, see air freight tonne-kilometres by country.

The panels cooperate downstream because the keys arrive resolved: DOT airport IDs on the American side, ICAO-prefixed codes in Europe, airport names plus groupings in the UK, ISO-style period columns everywhere. Pounds and tonnes ship normalized onto one basis, aggregate buckets ride tagged so they never masquerade as airports, and withheld cells arrive flagged rather than dressed up as zeros. Need the same airports joined to carrier segments, spot rates or commodity flows? Those shelves sit beside these records, and the join keys were designed to meet.

Start with a sample: name the airports, regions and years, and the extract comes back shaped like your question.

Product pages with complete field dictionaries and verified samples: ACI World Data Centre - Airport Traffic Statistics, Eurostat AVIA_GOOA main-airports table, Eurostat AVIA_GOOC by reporting country, UK CAA Aviation Data & Analysis and TranStats Airports Reference.