Now that I’ve built the terminal silhouettes for a number of airports, I can start to do some interesting things with them. For example, the three busiest airports in the United States—Atlanta, Los Angeles, and Chicago O’Hare—are all enormous, but I wondered how big they are compared to each other.
Atlanta, unsurprisingly, appears to be the largest; it’s certainly the one with the longest possible walk between gates, particularly since transferring between the domestic and international terminals at O’Hare requires a train or shuttle ride.
Los Angeles turns out to be surprisingly compact; although it has about the same passenger count as O’Hare, it takes up substantially less space.