TSA Screens Most Single-Day Passengers of Pandemic Era

The holiday travel season is clearly underway.

The Transportation Security Administration (TSA) screened the highest number of passengers at U.S. airports on Friday, November 19, since the COVID-19 pandemic began in late February to mid-March 2020.

The final count was 2,242,956 passengers who flew on Friday, the highest single-day number in more than 20 months since the pandemic shut down air travel.

JUST IN: @TSA officers screened 2,242,956 people at airport security checkpoints nationwide yesterday, Friday, Nov. 19. It’s the highest checkpoint volume since passenger volume tanked in early 2020 as a result of the pandemic. The Thanksgiving travel period has begun! #MaskUp

— Lisa Farbstein, TSA Spokesperson (@TSA_Northeast) November 20, 2021
The 2,242,956 passengers represented the greatest number of fliers on one day since February 28, 2020, when 2,353,150 took to the air. After that, air travel plummeted. By April 13, 2020, the number of single-day passengers dropped to just 87,534 – just three percent of what it was on the same day in 2019.

The November 19 passenger count on Friday was 88 percent of what the capacity was on November 19, 2019, when 2,550,459 people flew.

The TSA said it expects more than 20 million people to fly during Thanksgiving. The agency considers the Thanksgiving travel period this year to run from Friday, November 19 to Monday, November 28.

In addition to the single-day high, the TSA screened more than 2 million passengers on Thursday, November 18 and Saturday, November 20 – the first time since July 29 to August 2 that more than 2 million people went through security in three consecutive days.