Pandemic air travel slowly TAKING OFF
TSA processed 1M passengers at U.S. airports on one day
Just over a million passengers went through airport security checkpoints Sunday, a recovery milestone that shows both how far air travel has come from its worse days in April and how far it has to go to return to prepandemic numbers.
Vacation plans and business trips were frozen in the spring as millions took shelter to prevent spread of the coronavirus. With so little known about the virus, few wanted to board planes or walk through an airport even if they could.
The Transportation Security Administration said it processed 1,031,505 people at checkpoints Sunday, bringing the total for the four-day weekend to more than 3.7 million.
It’s a sign of the slow, but continual recovery since April, the low point of the pandemic for the airline industry. Only 87,534 people went through checkpoints on April 14.
Still, the million passengers only represent about 40 percent of the number of travelers on the comparable day a year ago, when 2.6 million people started journeys at U.S. airports.
The milestone comes after months of efforts by airlines, airports and other groups to convince passengers that airplanes are safe to travel on, even if COVID-19 infection and death rates inmany parts of the country begin to climb once again.
“TSA has been diligent in our efforts to ensure checkpoints are clean, safe and healthy for frontline workers and airline passengers, implementing new protocols and deploying state-of-the-art technologies that improve security and reduce physical contact,” a statement from TSA Administrator David Pekoske said.
The agency has been implementing plastic barriers and touch-free ID scanning technologies at security checkpoints, the release noted.
Several of the busiest days since mid-March have occurred in the past twoweeks and passenger loads gradually have been increasing, but that provides scant relief for an industry still reeling from the pandemic.
If Sunday’s level were maintained for an entire year, it would roughly roll the industry back to lev-els last seen 36 years ago, according to the trade groupfor large carriers, Airlines for America.
TSA daily traffic numbers, which the agency began reporting near the beginning of the pandemic, show airline traffic tends to spike sharply onThursdays, Friday and Sundays.
That’s because travel now is dominated by leisure travelers. Business travel is recovering much more slowly than leisure, and airline executives think it could be five to six years before business travel is back to prepandemic levels.
That’s a trend airline leaders have noted, since the work-fromhome trend of the pandemic has led to more people leaving on Thursdays and working remotely from a new destination for a day before a leisure trip.
“A big part of it is acknowledging that the customer is changing, and historically, the network airline business was really leveraged around a small percentage of customers who flew disproportionately for business,” American Airlines chief revenue officer Vasu Raja said in an investor call last month.
International traffic also has evaporated, even though countries are starting to open slowly with required testing before travel.
Lately, airport traffic has been dropping in the middle of the week, particularly Monday through Wednesday. On those days, passenger traffic is hovering around 30 percent of prepandemic levels.
Airplanes also were about 59 percent full last week, according to trade group Airlines for America. That compares to about 85 percent in 2019 and far below break-even levels for airlines.
Several of the busiest days since mid-March have occurred in the past two weeks and passenger loads have been gradually increasing, but that provides scant relief for an industry still reeling from the pandemic.
The steep drop in flyers has prompted billions of dollars of losses and tens of thousands of job cuts or voluntary furloughs as impacts reverberate across the aviation industry.
A federal aid package that had covered the costs of airline payrolls and forbid job cuts expired Oct. 1, and attempts to extend it have faltered in partisan gridlock.
Airlines received $50 billion in cash and loans from Congress in March on the condition they held off on layoffs at least through October. Airlines nowarewarning of mass layoffs while lobbying Congress and the White House for another $25 billion to pay workers for the next six months.
The point at which Congress can deliver broader coronavirus relief before the November election is slipping away. The gap between what’s being sought by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and her Senate Republican rivals and President Donald Trump seems increasingly insurmountable.
Southwest Airlines, which never has laid off employees in its roughly 50-year history, warned this month that it will cut pay for nonunion workers in January and that union workers also must accept less pay or face furloughs next year.
And while passenger numbers are increasing, no one knows if that trend will continue. Infections are spiking in the Midwest and stubbornly holding in place or edging higher in other parts of the country as colder weather settles in.
United and Delta Air Lines Inc. said last week that they expect a long, slow recovery until there’s a vaccine.
Rising daily passenger totals come as the United States’ coronavirus single-day case totals hit the highest point since late July, the Washington Post reported. The surge also comes a little over a month before Thanksgiving, a holiday that typically brings the busiest travel day of the year.