The next time you fly to another country, take a look at your boarding pass and the code that says what airport you’re flying to. Does it conjure up an image of runways and terminals, or does it make you think about the destination city itself? I’ll bet you think about the city—its cultural icons, its economy, its streetscape. The city’s essence, boiled down to three letters.
When people see LHR—London Heathrow—they see London: Big Ben, the Royal Family, and a jam-packed tube station. When they see LAX, they imagine Los Angeles: beaches, Hollywood, freeways snaking their way across the horizon.
And when global travellers see YYZ, they think of Toronto: live sports and entertainment, skyscrapers, an amazing mosaic of people from around the country and the world.
Iconic as they are, these major airports are not simply symbolic. They are integral cogs in the cities they serve. Their operations need safeguarding and their infrastructure requires strategic investment because they are economic drivers, large-scale employers, enablers of trade, tourism, conferences, culture—any sector or industry that relies on connectivity.
This is especially true of the largest hub airports, which facilitate the movement of people and cargo on a global scale. If your home airport isn’t a big hub, these claims might seem grandiose. But they’re impossible to deny.
Take LHR, which moved 81 million passengers and £188 billion ($338 billion CAD) worth of cargo a year before the pandemic. While Southampton, Liverpool, and the docks of London are important, Heathrow is the United Kingdom’s largest port of any kind.
Similarly, LAX is the gateway to the western United States. Its operations feed more than 600,000 jobs in Southern California, and it’s the only airport in the world to rank among the top 10 for passenger, cargo, and aircraft movements.
What about YYZ, Canada’s largest hub? New research, soon to be published by Toronto Pearson, shows the scope of its impact. The airport itself is home to 400 companies and 52,000 workers, according to Oxford Economics—the size of a small city. It’s the nucleus for the country’s second-largest employment zone, behind only Bay Street, with more than 500,000 jobs across many sectors, according to Deloitte. And the area around Pearson contains the highest concentration of manufacturing jobs in North America, according to the Trillium Network for Advanced Manufacturing.
Oxford found that Pearson welcomed 6.7 million non-resident visitors to Ontario in 2023 (and 44.8 million passengers overall), making it the top port of entry for our $100-billion national tourism trade; these visitors spent $3.7-billion. According to Oxford’s model, Pearson’s connectivity—its 200-plus direct flights to other airports—boosts Canada’s long-term productivity by 0.6 percent, which is an incredible contribution from one airport.
Toronto is the home base for two of Canada’s top three airlines. And it anchors Canada’s most important multimodal transportation crossroads: five 400-series highways, one of the busiest railway stations in North America, marine shipping access, and local transit for a greater urban area of six million people with a purchasing power of $2 trillion. This critical role made Pearson impossible to shutter during the pandemic. Even as airlines closed shop, the airport remained operational to facilitate the movement of goods, vaccines, and essential flights.
Airports like LHR, LAX, and YYZ become iconic because so many people pass through them. They’re big, loud, and hectic, just like the cities they serve. They tend not to win popularity contests. But these hubs are irreplaceable assets. We have to protect them and maximize their value to their communities because it’s nearly impossible to separate them—symbolically or practically—from the cities they serve.
According to the Innovative Research Group, 90 percent of Greater Toronto Area residents say having a major, modern airport is essential for the region’s success. They’re correct, and it says so right there on the boarding pass. LHR means London. LAX means Los Angeles. And YYZ means Toronto.
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