World’s busiest airport? Maybe

Rankings: Hartsfield-Jackson tops in passenger counts, but not in flights.

Hartsfield-Jackson is still the world’s busiest airport ranked by passenger counts, but not in flight counts,

Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport is still the world’s busiest airport ranked by passenger counts, but Chicago O’Hare has taken the lead in flight counts, according to final rankings issued Monday by a global airport association.

Airports Council International’s rankings showed Atlanta in the No. 1 position with 96.2 million passengers in 2014. Beijing was second. But when it comes to numbers of flights, O’Hare took the lead with 881,933 flights in 2014. Atlanta was bumped to the No. 2 position with 866,359 flights.

Angela Gittens, formerly the general manager of HartsfieldJackson and now director general of Airports Council International, said air traffic globally overcame many challenges and wound up exceeding traffic in 2013.

“Passenger traffic remained resilient in the face of the global uncertainties that beleaguered many economies in 2013 and 2014,” Gittens said in a statement. “International tourism, in particular, was irrepressible in 2014 consider- ing the geopolitical risks that have persisted in certain parts of the world, such as Eastern Europe and the Middle East.

“The Ebola outbreak also presented significant challenges to the aviation sector. Notwithstanding, by and large, the international traveler in 2014 appears to have been immune to these potential dangers. Overall global passenger traffic grew at a rate of over 5%. This is above the 4.3% average annual growth rate in passenger traffic from 2004 to 2014.”

The airport group released preliminary results earlier this year indicating that Atlanta maintained its title as world’s busiest in passengers but lost the No. 1 position in flight counts for 2014, and its traffic report released Monday confirmed the results.

Airports Council International is an association of 1,850 airports in 173 countries, the organization said.