airport traffic statistics

Airport traffic statistics are time series of the three headline measures an airport handles: passengers, freight and mail tonnage, and aircraft movements. They are published at monthly or annual frequency, and granularities differ in ways that matter.

ACI World Data Centre covers 2,600+ airports in 180+ countries annually across three metric families (tagged 'passenger traffic', 'cargo tonnage' and 'aircraft movements'), with a monthly collection of about 1,200 airports. The UK CAA releases 26 tables per annual edition plus 12 monthly releases per year across 2015-2026, each covering ~50-60 reporting airports. EUROCONTROL's airport traffic series starts January 2016 across state, FIR, airport, ANSP and network levels. BTS TranStats provides the U.S. counterpart - T-100 tables carrying passengers, seats, ASK and load factors from 1990 - and TranStats Airports Reference adds 1,485 US airport entries ranking 763 airports.

Buying on the label instead of the measure is the classic failure: one vendor's 'airport traffic' is passengers only, another's includes freight tonnage and movements. If your model needs cargo tonnes and the feed carries passenger counts, every downstream number is wrong in a way dashboards will not surface.

Frequency and geography matter just as much. ACI's monthly collection runs ~1,200 airports against 2,600+ in the annual set, so a monthly global panel is thinner than the annual headline implies. The UK CAA's ~50-60 reporting airports cover UK only. And licensing differs sharply: BTS data are U.S. Government commercial delivery terms, Eurostat publishes under commercial delivery terms 4.0, while ACI sells full datasets under a proprietary licence with only summary rankings free.

1. Match metric families to your use case. Confirm the feed carries all three families - passengers, cargo tonnage, aircraft movements - as ACI tags them, not a single blended index.
2. Test the coverage claim at the margin. ACI claims 2,600+ airports annually but ~1,200 monthly; ask how many airports appear in the specific months you need.
3. Check the start date. EUROCONTROL's airport traffic series begins January 2016 and BTS T-100 goes back to 1990 - pick the baseline your trend analysis requires.

These glossary entries sit next to airport traffic statistics:

• eurocontrol-aviation-intelligence-portal
• freight-mail-tonnage
• load-factor
• us government commercial delivery terms
• bulk download
• commercial delivery terms 4
• atfm en route delay
• eurocontrol aviation intelligence portal
• nas by the numbers fact sheet
• attribution non commercial license
• co2 emissions aviation