Istanbul Airport remains Europe's busiest air hub in July 15-21

By Tuba Ongun

Türkiye's Istanbul Airport remained the busiest air hub in Europe from July 15-21, Transport and Infrastructure Minister Abdulkadir Uraloglu said Thursday.

Uraloglu said the airport saw an average of 1,485 flights daily last week, citing data from the European Organization for Air Navigation Safety (Eurocontrol).

The figure decreased 0.5% from the prior week, the Eurocontrol data showed.

It was followed by Paris-Charles de Gaulle with 1,408 flights, down 0.4% and Amsterdam with 1,401 flights, falling 0.2% from the previous week.

On a weekly basis, all top airports handled more flights than in 2023, except Frankfurt which saw a 1% decline.

Within this top 10, the most affected airports on IT outage were iGA Istanbul (down 6% last Friday versus equivalent day in 2023), Palma de Mallorca (down 6%) and Frankfurt ( down 4%).

On July 19, a software update by US-based cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike led a mass IT outage worldwide at devices running Windows operating system. Most businesses were interrupted including transport as more than 5,000 flights were cancelled globally.

Antalya Airport in the Turkish Mediterranean resort city was ranked number eight on a ranking of Europe's busiest air hubs with 1,036 flights in July 15-21.

The UK was the busiest country, seeing 6,286 flights – including overflights – last week. Spain followed it with 5,923 flights and Germany with 5,280 flights from July 15 to 21.

Türkiye claimed fifth spot in Europe's busiest countries with 3,959 flights during the same period.

Ryanair was the top airline with 3,549 daily flights and easyJet was ranked second with 1,784 daily flights. The third-largest average daily flights were carried out by Turkish Airlines with 1,556 daily flights.

The top ten aircraft operators, registered a slight decrease of 1.1% in number of flights compared to the previous week, owing to the IT outage.

Most affected aircraft operators among the top 10 on 19 July were Vueling which saw a 19% plunge in the number of flights compared to 2023, KLM Group (down 17%) and Wizz Air Group (down 16%).