London’s Heathrow airport, which has operated close to the capacity of its two runways since the start of the decade, eked out a further 700,000 passengers to extend its lead as Europe’s top travel hub in 2016 as growth in Paris stuttered and Istanbul and Frankfurt fell back.
Heathrow’s traveler tally increased 1 percent to 75.7 million, while aircraft movements gained just 0.2 percent, suggesting that a trend toward the use of bigger jets at the airport, the main base for British Airways, continued last year as airlines sought to deploy more seats per flight.
