A new air-traffic study shows Denver International Airport ranks third in the nation for having the most destinations for scheduled commercial flights.
Airlines at DIA fly to 127 destinations, putting it behind No. 1 Atlanta, which serves 145 destinations, and airports in Chicago, which serve 133 cities, according to the Brookings Institution’s study.
“This confirms the centrality of Denver in the air system of the Intermountain West but also nationally,” said Brookings fellow Mark Muro.
“Those are a huge number of connections,” Muro said of the destinations served by DIA.
DIA is followed in the ranking by airports in the Dallas-Fort Worth area, which serve 124 cities, and Minneapolis-St. Paul, which serves 122 cities, the report said.
Brookings said its report is the first to analyze air travel between metropolitan areas instead of individual airports.
It ranks which metro corridors have the most air traffic between them and found that No. 1 in this category is the New York City area to the Miami area, with about 8.7 million passengers a year.
The measurement includes eight commercial airports in the New York and Miami-Fort Lauderdale areas.
The nation’s second-busiest commercial air corridor is between the Los Angeles and San Francisco areas, where airlines ferry about 6.3 million passengers a year.
Service between DIA and Los Angeles-area airports accounts for the Denver airport’s busiest route.
About 2.72 million passengers a year fly DIA-L.A., ranking it 17th on the list of the nation’s 100 most traveled corridors, Brookings said.
