Airport hits the 1M passenger milestone
SAN JOSE >> San Jose International Airport recently soared to a milestone for the coronavirus era: The Silicon Valley aviation hub handled at least 1 million passengers in a single month for the first time since the outbreak of the virus.
Slightly more than 1 million passengers flew through San Jose airport in May, city aviation officials said.
“Crossing the 1 million mark, though still short of the record numbers we saw just prior to the pandemic, puts San Jose International
Airport back in the range of monthly activity that we saw as recently as 2018,” said John Aitken, the city's director of aviation.
The milestone comes as the region's three major airports all see more passengers taking to the skies and more airlines launching or restarting routes they'd paused during the heart of the pandemic.
The 1,009,023 passengers who flew through the San Jose airport in May were nearly double the 589,600 passengers who used the airport in May 2021.
“We've looked forward to this milestone and see it as a signal that we are well on our way to recovery,” Aitken said.
However, the current number of travelers remains far below the average monthly passenger totals for the period that preceded the coronavirus and the government-ordered business lockdowns that began in March 2020.
Over the one-year period that ended in February 2020, the San Jose airport averaged 1.32 million passengers a month.
The May total of slightly more than 1 million passengers was 23.4% below the average number of passengers per month that the San Jose airport experienced prior to the coronavirus outbreak, this news organization's analysis of airport statistics shows.
Nevertheless, the airport is on an upward trajectory for its passenger activity, in the view of airport officials.
Over the first five months of 2022, San Jose averaged about 796,000 passengers a month, which was 116% higher, or more than double, the average of 368,100 passengers a month for the same five-month period in 2021, an analysis of the airport statistics determined. Plus, San Jose International has posted increases for four consecutive months, from February through May of this year.
The Silicon Valley travel market depends greatly on business travel and convention business, which have recovered far more slowly than the leisure and resort travel sector.
Still, encouraging signs have emerged to accompany the rising passenger totals. A growing number of airlines have launched new flights or resumed flights that had been canceled largely due to the coronavirus.
Among the recent disclosures of expanded or restored flights at San Jose's airport: British Airways recently restarted its daily, nonstop London-San Jose flights; Zipair, a lowcost Japanese carrier, announced plans for nonstop flights to connect Tokyo and San Jose; Southwest Airlines initiated service between Eugene, Oregon, and San Jose; Southwest is planning a new Palm Springs-San Jose route; and Southwest said it has added new summer flights to and from San Jose along the Pacific Coast, an upswing that includes as many as 20 daily nonstop flights between San Diego and San Jose.
“After nearly two years of watching our airport terminals slowly get busier and busier,” Aitken said, “May's traffic numbers certainly feel like a milestone to celebrate.”