About Atlanta
Hartsfield–Jackson Atlanta International Airport is the primary international airport serving Atlanta, Georgia, United States. It has been the world's busiest airport by passenger traffic since 1998, serving over 100 million passengers annually in most years. It is the primary hub of Delta Air Lines and is a focus city for low-cost carriers like Frontier and Southwest.
The airport uses a layout with the terminals and concourses arranged parallel to one another, perpendicular to the runways. This efficient design allows for simultaneous takeoffs and landings on its five parallel runways. Passengers are moved between the seven concourses by the "Plane Train," an automated people mover system located in underground tunnels.
Located 7 miles (11 km) south of downtown Atlanta, it is the largest employer in the state of Georgia. Its strategic location means it is within a two-hour flight of 80% of the United States population. The airport continues to expand, recently adding the international Concourse F to handle the growing global demand.
Hartsfield-Jackson's grip on the busiest-passenger crown stems partly from geography and partly from a corporate decision made in 1941: Eastern Air Lines chose Atlanta as its principal maintenance base, cementing the city's identity as a Southern aviation capital before Delta absorbed Eastern's operations in 1991. The airport occupies 4,700 acres straddling both Fulton and Clayton counties, a jurisdictional oddity that means fire response, policing and even liquor licensing follow different rules on opposite sides of the terminal loop road. Georgia's largest single employer since 1998, the site directly sustains roughly 63,000 badged staff and generates an estimated 34.8 billion dollars of annual regional economic impact according to a 2019 University of Georgia study, roughly equal to the entire GDP of Serbia at the time.