Hacker News Reader

Comment by overkill28 | Hacker News Reader

Yeah most of the people commenting in this thread probably come from countries where major airports are used primarily for international transit, and run by for-profit companies that want to maximize transfer passengers.

They have no concept of an airport getting 90 million domestic passengers a year.

View on HN

And yet of the top ten airports, all of whom do at least 75% of ATL's traffic, 7 are not in the US, and display similar characteristics of international traffic versus domestic.

I'm amused by the notion or implication that other countries are far more capitalistic and profit motivated than the US - when it comes to airports.

In some ways they are, like retail. The British Airports Authority used to be listed on the LSE as a retail stock, because Duty-Free Shopping (an afterthought in most US international airports) was such a big proportion of their revenues.

Oh, I have absolutely no doubt. I mean more that the implication that in the US, profoundly capitalist, at times to a fault, has airports as a bastion of socialized community benefit.

I'm assuming this is Atlanta? Got a source?

Yeah

> International passengers traveling to, from and through Atlanta in 2017 rose by 4.86 percent to 12,033,865, while cargo operations were up 5.66 percent. Overall, Hartsfield-Jackson hosted 103,902,992 passengers last year...

https://www.bizjournals.com/atlanta/news/2018/01/30/hartsfie...

Wow. I'm surprised that 90% is domestic for the busiest airport in the world, but I'm Canadian.

Thanks!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com