Nine years ago, I set a goal to fly though one hundred airports. This week, I finally achieved my goal by visiting Hartford (BDL).
My one hundred airports
Airport Locations
Of my first 100 airports, 82 are in the United States, and the remaining 18 are in other countries. (For more details, see the Complete List of My First 100 Airports section below.)
History
We moved around the country and world more than a few times when I was growing up, so I had a reasonable amount of air travel when I was young. However, I can only find flight data back to age 16, so my flight history (and airport count) starts then.
My flying was fairly minimal until 2009, when I moved into a position at work that required a decent amount of business travel. As I started to fly more, I began keeping track of where I flew; I started with spreadsheets, and eventually developed and switched to my flight log website by 2013.
Having the flight log meant that it was much easier for me to get statistics for my travel. In particular, by mid-2013 I noticed that I’d visited quite a few distinct airports. It was then that I set my goal to visit a hundred airports, and I created a blog at onehundredairports.com to create a post for every airport I visited. (I’ve since moved my collection of airports to the site you’re reading now.)
Each bar shows the number of airports I visited for the first time each year, and the number of airports I’d already visited in prior years. Together, their height shows the total number of airports I’d visited by the end of each given year. (2022 data only includes airports visited through 21 July 2022.)
Visiting new airports was easy at first. With Dayton (DAY) as my home airport, nearly everywhere I fly requires a layover, so I could pick up new airports just by choosing different cities to transfer through. Eventually, I picked up all of the major U.S. domestic hubs. For a lot of trips, I was also able to fly into alternate airports that were a further drive from my destination, but cheaper, than the closest airport to where I was going.
I continued to pick up a few new airports each year, ending 2019 with 96 airports, and fully expecting that at the rate I was going I’d get my 100th airport in 2020. Well, that didn’t quite happen as planned. In 2020 and 2021, my work travel was vastly reduced (though not entirely eliminated), so I didn’t visit any new airports in 2020 and only one in 2021.
This year, work travel has picked back up again. I also switched to a program at work which has travel to some different cities. Those new cities meant new airports, which is how I picked up my final three airports of Jacksonville (JAX), Albuquerque (ABQ), and Hartford (BDL).
The Century Terminal
One of my hobbies has been drawing silhouettes of airport terminals—specifically, the terminals for all airports I’ve visited.
To celebrate my 100th airport visit, I created a silhouette that imagined if all of my first 100 airports were combined into one gigantic terminal. The result: