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I'm your captain, Tim Harford.

We're now calling all passengers to buckle up and look forward to what 2026 might have in store for us, numerically of course.

I'm Simon Calder, travel correspondent of the independent and, as it happens, a mathematics

graduate, and my number for 2026 is 100 million. And it represents what I predict to be the number of international passengers

passing through Dubai International Airport on the Gulf in the United Arab Emirates.

It will be the first time that any airport anywhere in the world has hit that number.

100 million, that is a lot of people at the world's busiest airport in one year,

to get through security, passport control, to try all the perfumes in duty-free.

But Simon picked the number, not to shock us, but to show how global travel patterns are changing.

Because it just shows how the 21st century has turned into, well, a race between the airlines of the Middle East and those of Asia.

In the 20th century, it was pretty much America and Europe who ran the show

for aviation, but now the global superconnectors are based in the Gulf, and therefore the

centre of gravity for aviation has shifted thousands of miles or kilometres to the east.

And of course, unlike visitors to a shopping mall or a public park,

every passenger travelling through an airport is carefully counted.

We're still waiting for the passenger numbers in 2025 for Dubai.

I'm expecting them to be just over 96 million. That would indicate a 5% rise in

passenger numbers since 2024. And that really matches the pace of growth that we are seeing.

So it's certainly going to be at least 99 million, subject of course to the odd

pandemic, but I'm reckoning that by the end of December 26, the 100 millionth passenger

...