World's largest airlines

There are several ways to measure the size of an airline, so several different lists of the world's largest airlines are available.

Scheduled international passengers carried

 * * This figure is suspect as 40,532,000 is the total number of passengers flown by Ryanair in 2006 (see the rolling 12 months as at December 2006). Ryanair flies a small but still significant number of domestic routes in Ireland, the UK, Italy and Spain. Confirmation of the number of passengers flown on these routes is needed before Ryanair can claim top spot in the international passengers flown category. Even 25 domestic return flights a day with 135 passengers (both conservative estimates - there are at least a dozen daily domestic return flights in the UK alone and a similar number in Italy) would account for almost 2.5 million passengers.

Total scheduled passenger-kilometers flown
Source: Passenger-km

By fleet size in 2007
(as of October 2007)

United States & Canada
 Number of passengers 


 * Based on Bureau of Transportation Statistics 2004 Domestic Data and DOT Enplaned passenger data.