Travel drop crushes San Jose airport
Facility goes from serving record number of passengers to an almost 60% decline in March
Air passenger travel at San Jose International Airport nose-dived during March, but the numbers for April are expected to be even more dreadful, aviation officials said Wednesday.
A mere 508,100 passengers traveled through the Silicon Valley airport in March, San Jose’s Aviation Department reported. Those numbers were down 58.6 percent from the 1.23 million air travelers who transited through the airport in March 2019.
The activity levels in March represent a dreary about-face from the passenger totals just the month before.
In February, 1.08 million passengers traveled through the South Bay air hub, up 5.9 percent from February 2019. In January, San Jose airport handled 1.18 million passengers, up 8.8 percent from the same month in 2019.
And only a few months ago, San Jose airport trumpeted that it handled a record 15.7 million passengers during 2019, up 9.8 percent from the 14.3 million passengers in 2018.
San Jose airport is hardly alone. Nationwide,
air travel is down about 90 percent to 95 percent, according to multiple surveys by travel associations.
On Wednesday, San Jose officials warned that the airport is bracing for an even steeper decline in April than was the case in March.
“You will see an even larger reduction in passengers” in the April numbers, Demetria Machado, a spokesperson for San Jose International Airport, said. She added that during April, “Our traffic was down consistently down around 95 percent.”