London Heathrow to New York’s JFK has been named as Europe’s busiest airline route in 2024, according to aviation data specialist OAG.

The total number of seats in both directions on the LHR-JFK route was just over 4 million this year, which was up by 3 per cent on 2023’s capacity.

But this was only high enough to rank as the 10^th busiest international route globally in OAG’s Busiest Flight Routes of 2024, with the list topped by Hong Kong-Taipei at 6.8 million seats.

The global list was dominated by regional Asia-Pacific routes, which took seven of the top 10 places as air travel in the region continued to recover post-Covid. Although the second busiest international route this year was Cairo to Jeddah in Saudi Arabia at 5.5 million seats.

Europe’s second busiest international airline route was between Heathrow and Dubai at 3.15 million seats, followed by Rome Fiumicino-Madrid (2.4 million), Heathrow-Dublin (2.35 million) and Lisbon-Madrid (2.3 million).

Heathrow accounted for six of the top 10 busiest international routes in Europe, with routes from the UK hub to Doha, Los Angeles and Frankfurt also making the list.

Barcelona to Palma in Spain was the busiest domestic route in Europe with a total of 2.87 million seats this year, followed by Antalya-Istanbul Sabiha Gokcen in Turkey (2.7 million seats), Madrid-Palma (2.56 million) and Oslo-Trondheim in Norway (2.4 million).