In normal times, nine passenger airlines from the Middle East fly to the US. With 2.9 million round-trip passengers in 2025, the US Department of Transportation shows that Qatar Airways was the second-largest operator. Partly due to fewer flights, traffic was 16% lower than in 2024.

My articles that examine load factors usually focus on the least-busiest routes. That’s because they are, paradoxically, generally more popular with readers. But because of Qatar Airways’ unusually high figures, this article takes the opposite approach.

Qatar Airways’ Ten US Routes With The Highest Load Factors

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According to Cirium Diio data, the oneworld member had 11 passenger routes to the US last year. American Airlines also operated a route—Philadelphia to Doha—on its behalf.

Qatar Airways collectively filled 90.2% of its available seats, which was eight percentage points higher than all the airlines operating between the Middle East and the US. But, as always, Qatar Airways’ result says relatively little. As aircraft are usually full of lower-yielding traffic bound to/from South Asia, yields might not have been great.

It is always about how load factors were achieved. After all, the seat load factor is just one part of a route’s performance puzzle, and should not be considered in isolation. Influenced by the airline’s lack of Airbus A380 flights to the US, it had a comparatively low 329 seats per flight, which made achieving the strong overall result easier.

Only New York JFK Did Not Make The Table

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With 531,868 round-trip passengers last year, JFK was comfortably Qatar Airways’ largest US market. You’d not expect otherwise. Yet with a load of 85.1%, flights were not packed enough for this route to feature on the table. This is despite capacity falling by nearly a tenth year-over-year. Last year was only the airline’s sixth-best year in this sense, behind 2024 (86.9%), 2014 (86.8%), 2015 (86.2%), 2013 (85.2%), and 2022 (85.2%).

Unsurprisingly, booking data shows that South Asia was overwhelmingly Qatar Airways’ top region from the Big Apple. It accounted for nearly one in two passengers. At the country level, India was by far the most popular market. Around a fifth of passengers flew to/from the nation, which was a much smaller proportion than Etihad (60%), Kuwait Airways (44%), Emirates (40%), Gulf Air (40%), etc.

Dhaka was Qatar Airways’ top segment to/from New York. It is a massive market. Booking data suggest that the airline had around 17% of all traffic between the two cities. Only Emirates and Kuwait Airways carried more passengers.

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Qatar Airways’ Los Angeles Operation

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With 202,000 round-trip passengers, this long route—served daily on the A350-1000—was the carrier’s seventh most-trafficked US market last year. And with a load factor of around 90%, it was number seven in this sense too.

Thanks to a considerable number of Armenian Americans in Greater Los Angeles, Yerevan was comfortably Qatar Airways’ most popular market via Doha. It had around four times the traffic of the second-ranked Mumbai.

Due to Aeroflot’s sanctions, which means it cannot fly to the US, Qatar Airways has benefited significantly from its absence for traffic between Los Angeles and Yerevan. However, this will change in 2026, as Turkish Airlines has finally started flying between Istanbul Airport and the Armenian capital. And with no backtracking and more flights to Los Angeles, it’ll inevitably take market share from Qatar Airways.