SFO’s new 221-foot air traffic control tower will open next summer (Photo: Chris McGinnis)
Even if San Francisco is not your primary airport, a new report by the The City of San Francisco Controller’s office is an interesting read, ranking the airports we use most in a wide variety of factors, and comparing them to SFO.
Some interesting nuggets we gleaned from the report:
Boston has the most “origin and destination” traffic of most major US airports followed by Ft Lauderdale and Las Vegas. This means that BOS is used primarily by locals, or people flying to Boston– it’s not much of a hub airport where the majority of passengers are just connecting, such as Chicago, Houston and Dallas/DFW (and Atlanta, but for some reason, the report does not include the world’s busiest airport.)
Planespotters take note: New York JFK, Los Angeles and San Francisco (SFO) have the highest number of airlines serving them. JFK is home to a whopping 80 different carriers, while SFO has 49.
Related: Cloudy outlook for Washington Dulles
SFO, Las Vegas and New York JFK sell more stuff (food, beverage, concessions, duty free) per passenger than their peers. For example, those at the top of this list sell about $30 per passenger, while those at the bottom (Dulles, DFW, Ft Lauderdale) only sell about $10 per passenger.
Over the last 7 years, the number of passengers flying out of SFO grew 33%, followed by Miami and Seattle. (Much of that can be attributed to the arrival of Virgin America in 2007.) Washington Dulles is at the bottom of this list, having lost 13% of passengers in the same period.
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New York JFK, Miami and Las Vegas are where you’ll see the largest, fullest planes (they have the most “enplanements per flight”). Houston, Dulles and Chicago O’Hare are home to the largest number of smaller aircraft. Not surprisingly, Los Angeles, SFO and JFK have the largest number of big planes flying overseas routes.
Those who live in Chicago, Dallas and Houston have the most nonstop flights to the most cities. (Again, I think Atlanta would rank highly here, but it’s not included in this report.) Boston, Seattle and Ft Lauderdale have the fewest among the major airports studied. JFK, Miami and Newark have the most international nonstop destinations.
And here’s some info specific to SFO and the airlines that serve it. Most notable is that American is now the #2 carrier at SFO after United.
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Please, please, do not get lazy or misleading like mainstream media. Your title talks about “favorite” airports. The article is nothing about favorite airports at all.
Hardly surprising about Dulles. It’s an awful airport with distant gates and those ludicrous mobile lounges. I used to fly from Dulles to Atlanta a lot, and when I arrived at Dulles many times the total time from deplaning to driving off the airport parking lot was less than the total flying time I had just spent on the plane. After a few months of that nonsense I switched to National (it wasn’t called Reagan then) even though it was a much longer drive. I have also heard of people in the Maryland suburbs who hate Dulles so much that they’ll drive to Philadelphia for international flights.
RE: the claim that SFO, LAS, and JFK sell the most stuff… I wonder if that’s just because prices at those airports are higher. I go through SFO and LAS all the time and am stunned at the cost of simple things. A few weeks ago I was at the gift stop in SFO’s Terminal 1 and bought a candy bar that had no price tag. “How expensive can it be?” I reasoned. (It was almost $4 with tax.)