FAA airport categories
The
At the bottom end are general aviation airports. To qualify for the AIP, they must have at least 10 aircraft based there but handle fewer than 2,500 scheduled passengers each year. This means that most aircraft are small and are operated by individuals or other private entities, and little or no commercial airline traffic occurs. Nearly three-quarters of AIP-funded airports are of this type.
Most of the remaining airfields that qualify for funding are commercial service airports and are more dependent on regularly scheduled commercial airline traffic. This is subcategorized into primary airports, which handle more than 10,000 passengers each year, and nonprimary airports, which handle between 2,500 and 10,000 passengers annually.[2] These categories account for over 15% of AIP-funded airports in the U.S.
A third major category contains
Subcategories
Primary airports are further subcategorized based on the number of passenger boardings as a fraction of the national total. The categories are:[2]
- Nonhub primary – airports handling over 10,000 but less than 0.05% of the country's annual passenger boardings
- Small hub primary – airports with 0.05–0.25% of the country's annual passenger boardings
- Medium hub primary – airports handling 0.25–1% of the country's annual passenger boardings
- Large hub primary – airports handling over 1% of the country's annual passenger boardings
For reference, there were 899,663,192 boardings at commercial airports in 2018,[3] making the dividing lines 449,832, 2,249,158, and 8,996,632 boardings per year.
See also
References
- ^ "The Federal Aviation Administration's Take on Airports". General Aviation Flying. Aircraft Owners and Pilots Association. Archived from the original on September 27, 2007.
- ^ a b Federal Aviation Administration: Airport Categories
- ^ "Passenger Boarding (Enplanement) and All-Cargo Data for U.S. Airports". Federal Aviation Administration. Retrieved 2019-11-22. Includes a categorized list of all commercial airports with categories and boarding statistics.