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What are largest and smallest airports people have visited? Largest - Dubai by far. Smallest - Puerto Villamil - Isabela Island, Galapagos, Ecuador. It's a landing strip with a small building - no a/c nor shops nor drinking fountains. Primarily for Cessnas traveling to the other Galapagos islands.
The realistic answer would be private airstrips on private property?
Or a charted, unnamed, minimally improved airstrip on public land...though this probably doesn't meet the definition of "airport". Glacial esker with divots filled in, beach or river sand bar some determined soul dragged the worst of the boulders off of. Nothing as sophisticated as a windsock. There must be hundreds all over AK.
Gotta ask OP, when you say "visited", does that mean by aircraft only? I ask because a friend and I got very lost in pitch black, frigid, winter Wyoming driving back from a university trip. We finally pulled off the highway about 1 am and found a nice flat spot with almost no thorny vegetation so we could spread out our tarp and sleeping bags. I remember lying there in that "lazy" wind, shivering until I couldn't stand my chattering teeth any longer and finally got up to get the circulation going again. Once it was light enough to see, I noticed an oddly shaped fluttering thing a few yards away. It was a windsock. We were parked smack dab in the middle of some rancher's airstrip. Does that count as a visit?
Smallest Commercial Airport. Momote ( Manus Island ) Papua New Guinea. At least in the 1990s, just a runway, no terminal. Luggage was dumped on the tarmack. No one to check tickets. Half the passengers were carrying livestock.
Smallest Semi-Commercial Airport. Atkasuk, North Slope of Alaska. Just a runway and the police chief ( one-man police force ) to pick up anyone who dared land there ( and drive them into town ). We left the aircraft with it's engine running while we went into "town" to meet with the chief. Was 45 degrees below zero. That was also in the 1990s.
MDY, Henderson Field (Midway Atoll) - there's no terminal or airport for that matter, but a really long runway managed by the FAA
I've flown into that one too!
In addition, I've flown into the following small airports aboard commercial flights:
BRW (Barrow, AK) -- not the smallest I've ever been to, but perhaps the most remote, along with MDY.
CXF (Coldfoot, AK) -- a tourist flight, so I'm not sure it counts, but it did have a published flight number.
GST (Gustavus, AK) -- flew in on a small prop plane and flew out on the day's one and only jet flight.
MKK (Hoolehua, Molokai, HI).
SLN (Salina, KS) -- has a super-long runway, but only two commercial flights a day, one of which I was on.
SUA (Stuart, FL) -- this was during the short period of time that it offered commercial air service, back in the 1980s.
VLD (Valdosta, GA) -- Delta lost my luggage on that flight, but they got it to me the next day. I'll never forget the poor sap who was on the flight with me; he had flown from Taipei, to Seattle, to Atlanta, and then finally to Valdosta, and his luggage was lost too. Don't know if he ever got it back or not.
Probably smaller, but non-commercial and visited on small private planes, were the airstrips in Manassas, VA and Clewiston, FL. (I don't think either of them has an IATA code, so they don't count.)
In terms of the largest, does the OP mean the physical size of the airport grounds or the number of passengers served? In terms of actual size, it would be DEN (Denver, CO), MCO (Orlando, FL), and IAD (Dulles Airport, Washington). In terms of passengers, ATL (Atlanta, GA), DEN, ORD (Chicago O'Hare), LAX (Los Angeles), and ICN (Seoul-Incheon, South Korea).
What are largest and smallest airports people have visited? Largest - Dubai by far. Smallest - Puerto Villamil - Isabela Island, Galapagos, Ecuador. It's a landing strip with a small building - no a/c nor shops nor drinking fountains. Primarily for Cessnas traveling to the other Galapagos islands.
In terms of land mass, I'd probably say Charles De Gaulle Airport (CDG) in Paris is the largest I've flown in and out of. A close runner up though is Dallas Fort Worth (DFW).
In terms of numbers of flights coming in and out of the airport, I think Chicago's O'Hare Airport (ORD) is one of the busiest. London Heathrow (LHR) would be up there too.
One very small airport I have flown out of is the Minot Airport in Minot, North Dakota (MOT). As I remember, they had just a few flights a day out of there in forty seat aircraft.
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