Air Travel Continues Steady Increase

At this rate, by the end of the summer air travel could be right back to where it was in 2019 prior to COVID-19, defying some experts’ predictions that it would take well into 2022 for things to return to normal.

The Transportation Security Administration (TSA) reports two new post-pandemic records from the weekend – the single biggest day for travel and the biggest four-day, Thursday-to-Sunday period since the virus hit more than 15 months ago.

The TSA processed 2,167,380 passengers at airports throughout the U.S. on Sunday, June 27, the single biggest day since 2,198,517 people went through security on March 5, 2020 – 11 days before the date generally acknowledged as when air travel began to shut down across the world.

In addition to that, the TSA has a new four-day, Thursday-through-Friday, post-pandemic record from this past weekend. Starting with June 24 and ending Sunday night, 8,308,996 people went through security. That’s more than 205,000 people that traveled over the previous four-day post-pandemic record of 8,103,682 from the week prior from June 17-20 – and that was 189,302 passengers better than the week before that from June 10-13, when 7,914,380 took to the air.

So, how does that stack up to the banner year of 2019? Well, during the same travel period two years ago, June 24-27, some 10,442,613 people flew. That’s 21.5 percent more than this past weekend.

If air travelers continue at this rate of adding approximately 200,000 more passengers each week over the nine remaining weekends in summer until Labor Day, numbers for the year will be within striking distance of 2019 – four months before the year ends.