Holiday Weekend Air Travel Ends on Strong Note

The four-day July 4 holiday weekend ended strongly on Monday, as the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) recorded the third-highest number of air travelers since the pandemic began almost 16 months ago.

The TSA said that 2,160,137 fliers went through its checkpoints at airports across the country on Monday, July 5. That clocked in just behind the post-pandemic record of 2,196,411 set just 72 hours earlier on Friday, July 2, and the 2,167,380 who flew on Sunday, June 27.

For the four-day holiday from July 2 through July 5, a total of 7,953,471 people took to the air.

While that’s a healthy number and certainly far outpaces last year’s pandemic-affected total of 2.67 million people over the same four days, it still comes up well short of the July 2-5 stretch in 2019.

Two years ago, the Fourth of July holiday saw 10,074,186 people fly over a four-day span – and those four days were on a Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday, not exactly the optimal, popular flying days of Friday, Saturday, Sunday or Monday like this year.

The difference between the two holiday periods shows that air travel is still off about 21 percent capacity right now compared to 2019.