Istanbul Airport remains Europe's busiest air hub

ANKARA

Istanbul Airport remained the busiest air hub in Europe from July 15 to 21, Transport and Infrastructure Minister Abdulkadir Uraloğlu has said.

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

Within this top 10, the most affected airports by IT outage were iGA Istanbul (down 6 percent on July 19 versus the equivalent day in 2023), Palma de Mallorca (down 6 percent) and Frankfurt (down 4 percent).

On July 19, a software update by cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike led to a mass IT outage worldwide at devices running the Windows operating system. More than 5,000 flights were canceled 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 on July 15-21.

The U.K. was the busiest country, seeing 6,286 flights – including overflights – last week.

Türkiye claimed the 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, while 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.