Records tumble at airport checkpoints

92,421 pass through Hartsfield-Jackson on Friday before July 4.

A record 92,421 passengers passed through security checkpoints at Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport on the Friday before July 4th.

The airport said security wait times were less than 30 minutes throughout the day, an improvement from last year when waits were sometimes an hour long.

About 95 percent of passengers in regular lines had waits of 20 minutes or less, the airport said, citing figures from the Transportation Security Administration. Those in PreCheck lines waited less than five minutes.

The previous record was set on the Friday before Memorial Day of this year, when 90,068 passengers went through security at the world’s busiest airport. The third-highest was Friday, March 31, with 85,516 passengers going through security.

The numbers do not include passengers who are only connecting through Atlanta, because they don’t typically go through security. Those passengers boost Hartsfield-Jackson’s total daily volume to more than 280,000.

Hartsfield-Jackson handled more than 104 million passengers last year.

Traffic has been volatile this year. Year-over-year passenger counts were on the upswing in January and March but fell 4.2 percent in April, when a Delta Air Lines meltdown led to more than 3,000 cancellations over five days. Passenger counts declined slightly in February and were down 0.8 percent in May compared with the same month in 2016.

Total passenger volume for the first five months of the year was 0.09 percent below the same period of 2016, with domestic counts down 0.7 percent and international volume up nearly 5 percent. International passengers make up about 11.4 percent of the total.