Explore the world with Canadian freelance travel journalist Mark Stachiew.
The country with the most airports in the world, more than 33 per cent of the global total, is the United States.
As of 2017, the U.S. boasted 14,263 airports, 5,104 which were public airports.
The countries with the next largest number of airports are Brazil and Mexico with 4,093 and 1,714 airports respectively.
The world’s airports are identified by three-letter codes known as IATA station identifiers. You’ve no doubt seen them on your baggage tags when you were flying somewhere.
Some of them are abbreviations of the cities they are located in like MEX for Aeropuerto Internacional Benito Juárez in Mexico City while others are derived from the airport’s name like JFK for John F. Kennedy Airport in New York City.
Some, however, seem to make no sense, but they are often references to historical names like ORD for O’Hare in Chicago. It’s former name was Orchard Field. And in the case of Canada, it gets complicated with which one has a weather station and which one does not.
It’s all explained on this Wikipedia page.
Listening to air traffic controllers on the radio is not an activity that appeals to everyone, but there are enough aviation geeks out there that it has spawned an entire website that collects dozens of live streams from airports around the world. Get your #avgeek fix on LiveATC.net
You can pretty much fly from any one point on Earth to another within a day or two, but chances are you’d have to make multiple connections to do so. Flight Connections shows you the direct flights from every major airport so you can plot your travels most efficiently.
Before the advent of TV monitors, airport terminals presented arrival and departure times on electro-mechanical split-flap displays. They were commonly known as Solari boards after their Italian manufacturer or as Pragotrons for those who bought them from their Czech competitor. Travellers old enough to remember the displays can tell you they made a distinctive clatter whenever the times were refreshed.