The Top 50 U.S. Terminal Radar Approach Control Facilities

Every year the “F Hey Hey” crunches their numbers and comes out with the standings for the past fiscal year (FY). This data is important in establishing bragging rights. If Tampa is higher than Salt Lake…well then a Tampa controller can talk trash to a Salt Laker. This dick measuring contest has been going on since the days of Archie League.

Here’s some things to note when reading this chart:

The numbers are total operations for the year (divide by 365 if you really need to estimate the daily ops count). “Operations” are arrivals, departures, overflights, VFR aircraft screwing around, etc.
Some facilities will have “Tower” in their name. Miami tower is an “Up/Down” facility (Sort of). The data in this table is just for the operations that the TRACON portion of the facility worked.

RANK	ID	NAME	FY15	FY16	CHANGE
1	SCT	Southern California	2,063,122	2,099,756	+36,634
2	N90	New York	1,892,552	1,949,388	+56,836
3	NCT	Northern California	1,558,229	1,586,639	+28,410
4	PCT	Potomac	1,417,578	1,426,859	+9,281
5	C90	Chicago	1,252,133	1,254,412	+2,279
6	D10	Dallas-Fort Worth	1,205,819	1,213,222	+8,089
7	A80	Atlanta	1,167,065	1,198,348	+31,283
8	MIA	Miami Tower	979,245	1,009,725	+30,480
9	I90	Houston	939,698	913,611	-26,087
10	D01	Denver	792,982	820,064	+27,082

As you can see from the table above, only Houston TRACON lost some traffic (by an average of 71 operations per day). The remaining facilities in the top ten increased their traffic by an average of 1.9%. Obviously many factors can come into play when this happens (i.e. weather events, airline mergers/bankruptcies, etc). Click here for numbers 11-20 on the list