Istanbul Airport continues to be busiest air hub in Europe

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

The airport saw an average of 1,485 flights a day last week, Uraloglu said on Thursday, citing data from the European Organisation for the Safety of Air Navigation (Eurocontrol).

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

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

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

Antalya airport in 8th place

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.

Mass IT outage worldwide

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.

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

The top ten aircraft operators, registered a slight decrease of 1.1 percent 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 percent plunge in the number of flights compared to 2023, KLM Group (down 17 percent) and Wizz Air Group (down 16 percent).