Fort Lauderdale Hollywood International Airport

Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood International punches well above its weight: 73 airlines operate 531 routes to 276 nonstop destinations, a destination count that exceeds all but a handful of airports globally and places FLL among the top five U.S. airports by international route count. The scale is remarkable given the airport has only two runways and no hub carrier in the traditional sense — the traffic is driven entirely by low-cost carriers, leisure demand, and cruise-port feed. Spirit Airlines runs its largest crew and aircraft base here, with JetBlue operating its major Caribbean and Latin American gateway from FLL and Southwest maintaining a substantial operation. The airport is South Florida's principal low-cost counterweight to MIA, handling over 35M passengers in peak years despite sharing a metropolitan area with one of the busiest international gateways in the Americas. Four terminals (1–4) arranged around the central core serve a mix of domestic, trans-border Caribbean, and South American flights. FLL sits 9 ft (3 m) above sea level directly between I-95, the Florida East Coast rail line, and Port Everglades — the world's third-busiest cruise port — which makes the airport the de facto staging point for Caribbean cruise traffic out of Fort Lauderdale. The recent extension of Runway 10R/28L to 8,000 ft (2,438 m), built on elevated structure over the FEC tracks and U.S. 1, was one of the more unusual pieces of airport civil engineering of the last 20 years, allowing simultaneous independent runway operations where previously only one could be used at a time.