Dubai Airport to Become the Busiest Airport of the Decade according to CEO

Dubai airport announced on Monday a record of 7.7 million passengers used the airport in August. Dubai Airport operators expected the airport to be the busiest airport this decade.

In an interview with Bloomberg TV, Dubai Airport chief executive Paul Griffiths said, "The airport, which overtook London Heathrow in 2014, expects passenger traffic to climb to 83 million this year from 78 million last year and expects 90 million people using the facility next year. The growth rates that we are experiencing are more than double what is being experienced by both Beijing and Atlanta." Griffiths further added that "Within perhaps this decade, we should see ourselves exceeding the total traffic through those airports for the No 1 absolute spots." For the full interview you may watch the video here.

It was reported that expansion of the Emirates airlines contributed to the growth of the airline usage. In August, the airport experienced shutdowns after an Emirates jet crash-landed but Dubai airport operators said that it did not affect the airport's target traffic. An investigation of the incident is still ongoing and the civil aviation regulator of the country had already released an interim report but Griffiths said he can't "speculate on the outcome," reported Bloomberg.

According to Fortune, Dubai is already the busiest in terms of international traffic and would soon become the busiest, according to Airports International Council, for both international and domestic passenger flights. The main hub for Delta Airlines, the Atlanta Hartfield-Jackson airport is the currently the busiest for total passenger traffic with 5.3 million additional passengers and a total of 101.5 million for 2015 while Beijing comes in second adding 3.8 million to reach 89.9 million last year.

The seasonal rush of travelers, in particular UAE residents returning for the start of the academic year, boosted traffic and led to a bumper month, the airport operator said. Passenger traffic at Dubai International showed a 6.1 percent increase from 7,282,256 August of last year to 7,727,105 in August for the current year.