Aero South Pacific Airport Briefs available for download
By Andrew Curran
Aero South Pacific has released its first airport briefs, covering Australia’s top 20 passenger airports.
The briefs, which you can download for free via the Airport Briefs drop-down menu at the top of this page, provide a handy snapshot of scheduled regular passenger transport and passenger charter activity at Australia’s busiest airports.
What makes an airport busy? We use annual passenger traffic data obtained through open-source Bureau of Infrastructure and Transport Research Economics publications.
For airports handling domestic only traffic, the most up-to-date data (at the time of publishing Version 1 of the briefs) covers the 12 months to October 31, 2026. For airports handling international and domestic passenger traffic, the most-up-to date data covers the 12 months to September 30, 2026.
Unsurprisingly, Sydney Airport is Australia’s busiest airport, handling more than 40 million passengers in the 12-month period. The quietest of the top 20 airports, Hamilton Island, processed just under half a million passengers.
It’s worth noting that towards the tail end of the top 20 airports, rankings do change and an airport that makes the top 20 list relying on the current data set may drop off when the next data set gets released.
Essential airport data in one document
Aero South Pacific’s Airport Briefs begin with some essential airport data, such as who owns and operates the airport, runway information, the number of scheduled operators, weekly departures, and city-links, among other data points.
The briefs continue with a series of distinctive boxes, the first naming each scheduled passenger and passenger charter airline that serves the airport, and the second listing every destination served from that airport.
A bar chart illustrates annual passenger traffic over 12 months. In most cases, a single bar chart adequately shows the breakdown between international and passenger traffic. In a minority of cases, where the international passenger traffic is significantly less than the domestic traffic, two bar charts are necessary. Where an airport only handles domestic traffic, a single, one-colour only bar chart reflects this.
Another box (covering several pages in the case of busier airports) drills into the scheduled passenger and passenger charter activity at each airport.
Each airline is listed and against that listing are details of destinations that the airline flies from the airport, how often (on a weekly basis), and with what aircraft. A weekly departure tally for each airline at the airport is also provided.
Footnotes at the bottom of each page denote soon-to-end seasonal services and flag scheduled passenger charter services (primarily mining and resources FIFO activity) that are not open to the general public. Why do we include them? Scheduled passenger charters convey people and contribute to an airport’s annual passenger count. They also generally run to a discernible schedule, although like regular passenger flights, schedules can (and do) change.
Where the data comes from
Where do we get our data from? Many of the airlines have online booking and timetable portals which we manually collected data from over several weeks. Many smaller airlines have less sophisticated booking portals but publish PDF style schedules. In all cases, we cross-checked over a period of time against other resources, such as dynamically updating airport arrivals and departures boards, and open-source sites like as Google Flights, FlightConnections, and FlightRadar24.
It was a time-consuming build. However, the result is a thorough overview of airline activity at each airport. The date range we examined? February 2026 – towards the end of the IATA 2025/26 winter season. Airlines continually tinker with their schedules, but our data provides a solid picture through the start of the 2026 summer season, at which point, we’ll update.
The Airport Briefs conclude with a chart of each airport.
Aero South Pacific will be releasing additional data sheets and reports throughout 2026, some of which will be complimentary and some available for purchase. We also plan to start a straightforward and affordable subscription aviation news alert service that will deliver breaking news straight to your phone.
We’ll continue to post news and updates on www.aerosouthpacific.com each weekday and keep sending out our weekend newsletter summary of the week.
Photo: Jetstar.
Contact the writer: andrew@aerosouthpacific.com