Airport passenger traffic shows steady rebound from coronavirus woes
Oakland International Airport is showing a steady rebound from its coronavirus-linked nosedive in passenger traffic. Yet the East Bay aviation hub's traffic remains well below where it stood prior to the outbreak of the deadly virus.
The East Bay airport handled 819,955 passengers in January, up 38.2% from the same month in 2022, aviation officials reported.
And during the 12-month period that ended in January, 11.37 million passengers transited through Oakland International, the new activity statistics show.
That annual pace of passenger flight activity is well ahead of what the airport accommodated in the past three years — but it's still below the number of passengers who traveled through the airport in 2019, the last full year before the onset of coronavirus-linked shutdowns and travel restrictions.
Oakland's airport handled 13.38 million passengers in 2019, 4.62 million passengers in 2020, the first year of the coronavirus shutdowns, 8.14 million passengers in 2021 and 11.15 million passengers in 2022.
The totals for the most recent 12 months ending in January were about 2% higher than the total for the calendar year 2022.
However, the recent oneyear period was 15% below passenger transits through the airport during 2019.
Despite the reality that the Oakland airport has a ways to go before it can climb back to the passenger heights it had experienced in 2019, airport officials are heartened by some recent decisions by airlines to increase their flights connecting to Oakland.
Among the routes that have been added at Oakland International Airport:
• Southwest Airlines is adding service to Baltimore in September and St. Louis in April.
• Spirit Airlines is adding flights to Dallas-Fort Worth in May
• Volaris is adding international flights to El Salvador's capital city of San Salvador.
“Our airline partners have made some exciting Oakland airport route announcements as of late,” said Bryant Francis, Oakland's director of aviation.