Half a million user-entered flights!  That’s a pretty respectable number, and the way things are going, we’ll be looking at the Big One-Oh-Oh-Oh-Oh-Oh-Oh sometime early next year.  What’s changed since 250,000?

Top 10 Airlines

	Airline	250k rank	World rank
1	Delta/Northwest	5 (+4)	1
2	Lufthansa	1 (-1)	5
3	United Airlines	2 (-1)	4
4	American Airlines	3 (-1)	3
5	Air France-KLM	7 (+2)	6
6	Continental Air Lines	4 (-2)	9
7	British Airways	6 (-1)	?
8	Ryanair	10 (+2)	8
9	US Airways	9	10
10	Scandinavian	11 (+1)	?

The big news is that Delta-Northwest grabs the top spot in both IATA’s 2009 stats and on OpenFlights, beating Lufthansa by a hair.  Similarly, Air France-KLM has leapt ahead and Ryanair continues its inexorable ascent, grabbing the 8th position in both lists.  So once again we’ve got 8 out of 10: as ever, world #2 Southwest remains striking in its absence, although it did creep up two spots to OpenFlights #19, and world #7 China Southern Airlines is a mere #49 in OpenFlights.  Chinese flyers, where are you?

A statistical sidenote: on OpenFlights, we figure out airlines from flight numbers, so regional affiliates not using their parents’ codes are not going to show up here.  Since all the majors have their own sidelines, I figure they’re all disadvantaged more or less equally, and this thus probably doesn’t make a huge difference.

Top 10 Airports

	Airport	250k rank	World rank
1	Frankfurt Main (FRA)	1	9
2	London-Heathrow (LHR)	2	2
3	Chicago Ohare Intl (ORD)	3	4
4	Charles de Gaulle (CDG)	6 (+2)	6
5	Munchen (MUC)	4 (-1)	30
6	Los Angeles Intl (LAX)	5 (-1)	7
7	Amsterdam-Schiphol (AMS)	8 (+1)	14
8	Atlanta-Hartsfield (ATL)	10 (+2)	1
9	New York-John F Kennedy Intl (JFK)	9	12
10	San Francisco Intl (SFO)	11 (+1)	20

No change in the top three, with Frankfurt still reigning supreme.  Charles de Gaulle, new at 250k, has climbed up another two notches to number 4, and world #1 Atlanta has avoided the ignominy of falling off the list and moved up to a more secure perch at #8.   On the other hand, Houston’s George Bush Intercontinental, which made it as high as #4 in the 100,000 stats, has now collapsed to #11.  Still no sign of Beijing or Haneda, will this change now that HND is fielding more international flights?

What next?

The next job in the never-ending OpenFlights task queue is reworking our flight import system, which is a bit too buggy for comfort at the moment, but after that is autocompletion and, yes, that should finally include using previous flight data to suggest source and destination airports, plus possibly flight times as well. Stay tuned!

Looking forward to his first million,
-jani