the airline industry · demand, geography & connectivity
Airlines around the world
A planet connected by air. Airlines turn geographic distance into a network of destinations. Explore the industry through eleven chart views: from passenger demand and seat capacity to the hubs, regional corridors and airline portfolios that connect the world.
Industry figures: full-year 2025, as published by IATA on 29 January 2026. This dated release contains provisional figures that may subsequently be revised.
01 / The passenger economy
Demand, capacity and the seats in between
A passenger kilometer measures traffic; a seat kilometer measures the capacity offered to carry it. Comparing their growth reveals where demand outpaced capacity.
Who grew fastest?
Annual growth, by airline region. Africa leads this measure; North American capacity grew faster than demand.
Where is the traffic?
Share of global passenger kilometers. Asia Pacific and Europe together account for 61.1%.
The utilization picture
Load factor expresses how much available seat capacity is used, weighted by distance. The colored part is used capacity; the dark remainder completes the bar to 100%.
All three charts cover domestic and international scheduled passenger traffic. Regions refer to carriers, rather than passengers' origins. The IATA Asia Pacific and Latin America groups differ from the seven geographic groups used in the network below.
02 / The network beneath the industry
174 connections, wrapped around one planet
The following views use a selected June 2014 OpenFlights network, a historical lens on connectivity. Each edge is one recorded nonstop airport pair, combining both directions and selected carriers. These counts describe this sample, rather than global traffic volumes.
The globe places the airports at their coordinates and raises the route edges above its surface. The circular graph shows the same connections together. Colors identify airport regions; larger nodes have more connections.
Drag the globe to turn it and scroll to zoom. Select a hub or click an airport in either view to highlight its connections in both charts. Arc height changes the elevation of the edges. The hemisphere buttons rotate the view; Reset restores the whole network.
A flatter view of the hubs
Bubble area is proportional to the number of connected airports. Hover a hub to see its connectivity, destination regions and median route distance. Close neighbors in Europe stand out more clearly in the ranking below.
Which hubs connect the sample?
CDG · Paris leads with 21 connected airports. Switch to Regions reached to compare geographic breadth.
How do regions connect?
Ribbons aggregate airport pairs. Wider bands mean more connections; bands returning to their own arc represent routes within a region. Hover an arc or ribbon to inspect it.
140 of 174 pairs cross regions. This selection emphasizes hubs with long-distance links. Arc width counts route endpoints; an internal pair contributes two endpoints to its region.
03 / The shape of an airline portfolio
Distance changes the network
Two airport pairs can mean very different journeys. Distances here are shortest paths over a spherical Earth, computed from airport coordinates; actual flown distances may be longer.
How far apart are the destinations?
Each pair appears in one 2,000 km bin. Blue and red distinguish routes within a region from routes across regions.
Which carriers cover which distances?
Each bubble is an airline: horizontal position is its pair count, vertical position its median distance, and area its number of airports. Colors follow its representative hub's region. Hover for the full name.
The longest pair in this sample is ATL ↔ JNB at approximately 13,583 km. Carrier pair counts overlap because several airlines can be recorded on the same pair. The portfolio chart measures coverage of these selected airports.
04 / Seeing the routes as a matrix
When airline networks overlap
97 airport pairs have more than one selected carrier recorded. The matrix replaces crossing edges with cells: brighter cells mean more carriers. Airports follow the same regional order as the network. Hover to identify any pair.
The matrix is symmetric because directions are combined. A dark cell means no record among the selected carriers and airports; it does not establish that a route was unavailable. Neither carrier overlap nor edge count measures flight frequency, capacity or market share.
Sources and method
The three industry charts use the full-year 2025 table in the IATA release of 29 January 2026. RPK is revenue passenger kilometers; ASK is available seat kilometers. Load factor is their ratio. Growth compares 2025 with 2024. Regional shares use RPK.
The network bundles 24 airports and 24 selected airlines from OpenFlights. Its routes are a June 2014 snapshot: nonstop, non-codeshare records with both endpoints in the selected airport set. Self-links are excluded. Duplicate records, opposite directions and carriers are combined into one unordered pair; carrier names are retained. The representative airline on a hub is a label, and need not operate every edge. TAM's historical name is retained.
Degrees count neighboring airports. Region ribbons count each pair once. Carrier portfolios count a pair for every carrier recorded on it. Distances use the haversine formula with an Earth radius of 6,371.0088 km, and medians weight each pair equally. These are derived network measures, with no passenger or flight weighting. OpenFlights / OurAirports / Airline Route Mapper attribution and ODbL / DbCL source notes are bundled alongside the data.
Charts behind the infographic
The geo package draws the globe3d and Natural Earth projections. Airport coordinates feed scattergeo; scattergeo.line.lift raises the great-circle edges. The globe occludes its far-side routes as it rotates. The graph chart uses the same indexed edge list with a circular arrangement. The regional chord chart aggregates those edges into ribbons, while the route matrix is a heatmap. Bars, a donut and a bubble scatter plot provide the other perspectives. All charts use the docs theme and resize with their containers.