Addis Ababa Bole International Airport

Addis Ababa Bole International Airport is the principal airport of Ethiopia and, by a very substantial margin, the busiest airport in sub-Saharan Africa — having overtaken Johannesburg O. R. Tambo as the largest African aviation hub in the late 2010s. Located 4 mi (6 km) southeast of central Addis Ababa, ADD handles 122 routes to 112 destinations operated by just 10 airlines — a route-to-carrier ratio that is one of the most extreme in the world and reflects the near-monopoly position of Ethiopian Airlines within the country's aviation sector. The destination count of 112 places ADD among the top 30 airports in the world by connected destinations, despite Ethiopia's modest GDP and population relative to peer global hubs. This is a classic single-carrier hub pattern. Ethiopian Airlines — one of the fastest-growing and most internationally ambitious airlines in the world — operates its sole hub at ADD and has progressively built the airport into the pan-African aviation gateway par excellence. The Star Alliance carrier operates to essentially every major African city, plus transatlantic service to the US (Washington Dulles, Chicago, Newark, Houston), Canada (Toronto), Europe (London, Paris, Frankfurt, Brussels, Stockholm, Rome, Madrid, Dublin, Oslo, Manchester, Vienna, Geneva, Istanbul), the Middle East, South Asia (New Delhi, Mumbai), East Asia (Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, Tokyo, Seoul), and South America (São Paulo, Buenos Aires). Other operators include Turkish Airlines, Emirates, Qatar Airways, flydubai, Egypt Air, Kenya Airways, RwandAir, ASKY Airlines (Ethiopian-partnered West African affiliate), and a small contingent of African regional carriers. Addis's geographic position — roughly midway between Johannesburg, Cairo, and the Gulf — makes it structurally optimal as a pan-African transfer hub. The airfield sits at an extreme high elevation of 7,630 ft (2,326 m) — one of the highest elevations of any major international airport in the world — with two parallel runways: 07R/25L at 12,467 ft (3,800 m) and 07L/25R at 12,139 ft (3,700 m). The long runways and large widebody fleet (777, A350, 787) compensate for the thin high-altitude air. The terminal complex has undergone repeated expansions; the 2019-opened new terminal tripled annual capacity to approximately 22 million passengers, with further expansion in planning to take ADD well past 100 million annual passengers in the long term.