Airlines Re-Set Pandemic-Era Travel Record Again

All you need to do is watch any local TV news broadcast from the weekend to see the touching, heartwarming videos of people, including small children, surprising their parents and grandparents for the first time in months.

Maybe longer.

And they did it by getting on a plane in record numbers.

Mother’s Day Weekend proved to be quite fruitful for the aviation industry as a little more than 1.7 million people took to the air on Sunday, a pandemic-era record for travelers.

That broke the record that was just set 48 hours earlier on Friday with just under 1.7 million, according to the Transportation Security Administration. It’s the highest number since March 2020, when travel was all but wiped out due to the coronavirus pandemic.

The number of people being screened by the TSA at airports across the country was about 4,500 more on Sunday than on Friday.

While that is still down 29 percent from the number of people who traveled by air on the same day in 2019, it nonetheless is an encouraging number given the context of the virus. At one point in April 2020, U.S. airlines were down to just five percent capacity – including some flights that took off with just one or two passengers on board.