✈️ Pakistan’s Airport Power Shift: How Karachi Lost Ground — and Islamabad Rose.

This dashboard tells a quiet but important story about Pakistan’s aviation geography over time.

Karachi is still big — but it is no longer dominant.

Islamabad has quietly risen to challenge that dominance.

Let’s look at the numbers 👇

📉 Karachi: absolute scale, relative decline

Karachi JIAP handled ~106 million passengers cumulatively over the period shown — still the largest in absolute terms.

But its passenger share has steadily eroded over the last decade.

International passengers now make up ~55% of Karachi’s traffic — the lowest international ratio among the big three airports.

Post-COVID, Karachi’s recovery has been slower and flatter, with its passenger curve failing to regain its earlier lead.

📌 Karachi didn’t collapse — it was overtaken.

📈 Islamabad: the fastest climber

Islamabad now records ~51.7 million international passengers, almost matching Lahore and narrowing the gap with Karachi.
Its international passenger ratio is ~66.7%, significantly higher than Karachi.

Over time, Islamabad’s passenger trend shows:

Steady pre-COVID growth

A sharp dip in 2020–21

And then a stronger rebound than Karachi

In short: Islamabad became more international, faster.

🏗️ What changed?

This shift reflects structure, not luck:

Better alignment with long-haul international routes
Growing role as a diplomatic, diaspora and transit hub
Airline network decisions favoring yield and connectivity, not just population size

Or may be given most of Pakistans international traffic is mostly gulf migrant workers and largest chunk of them come from KP and North / Central Punjab , its only natural Islamabad airport or Peshawar airport and NOT Karachi airport was to be largest airport

So in many ways its a course correction that has happened?