A few days ago, OpenFlights reached 50,000 flights, so it’s a good time to take a look at how that mass of data is shaping up.

Top 10 Airlines

	Airline	World rank
1	United Airlines	2
2	Lufthansa	6
3	American Airlines	1
4	Continental Airlines	4
5	Delta Air Lines	3
6	US Airways	?
7	British Airways	9
8	Northwest Airlines	7
9	JetBlue Airways	?
10	Qantas	?

The top 4 airlines by passenger-km according to IATA all make it to the OpenFlights top 5 as well, with only world number 5 Air France (#13 on OpenFlights), #8 Southwest (#20 on OF) and #10 Singapore (#12 on OF) missing from the top 10. Lufthansa makes a strong showing, as we’ll see again in the next section…

Top 10 Airports

	Airport	World rank
1	Chicago Ohare Intl (ORD)	2
2	Frankfurt Main (FRA)	9
3	London-Heathrow (LHR)	3
4	Munchen (MUC)	27
5	Houston-George Bush Intcntl (IAH)	16
6	New York-John F Kennedy Intl (JFK)	13
7	Boston-General Edward Lawrence Logan (BOS)	?
8	Los Angeles Intl (LAX)	6
9	Newark Liberty Intl (EWR)	25
10	San Francisco Intl (SFO)	19

Much more scattershot results, this time comparing against Airports Council International. The big surprises are that world #1, Atlanta-Hartsfield (ATL), only makes it to #12 on the OpenFlights list, and world #4 Tokyo-Haneda (HND), almost entirely domestic, doesn’t even make it into the top 100 on OpenFlights (we obviously need a Japanese version!).  The effects of airline popularity are also visible: not-too-popular Air France pushes world #5 Paris-CDG down to #16, while Lufthansa powers both Frankfurt and Munich to a disporportionately high rank.

What next?

At this early stage, it’s clear that regional popularity and even individual users can distort the stats quite a bit.  However, as the flights accumulate, the database should start to more and more closely resemble the real world, and this will also open up the possibility of introducing all sorts of neat features.  Enter a flight number, and we’ll already know what route it represents; pick an airline, and we’ll show you its entire network; select an airport or two, and we can tell you what flights exist (or existed) between them.  Stay tuned for our next update at 100k!

Forward to the future,
-jani