U.S. air travel finds new normal, but volumes remain low

by GABRIEL CORTES | Oct. 29, 2020

After I started working from home in March, I became pretty good at not going out. With the exception of weekly trips to get groceries or to go running around my neighborhood, I rarely left my apartment. I was on my best pandemic behavior.

I had moved to St. Paul from southern California the summer before when I began working at APM Research Lab, and I was still finding my footing when the pandemic upended all my plans for my new life. And when it became clear in August that I would be working remotely for the foreseeable future, I decided it was time to give up my Minnesota experiment.

The idea of moving cross-country for the second time in a year was daunting, but even more terrifying was deciding how I would get home to California. Renting a moving pod and flying to Los Angeles was the obvious choice, but the thought of getting on an airplane in the age of COVID…

Thankfully, my pragmatism won over my paranoia, and I bought a very inexpensive, one-way ticket from MSP to LAX.

The decision to fly again is one that more and more people have been making since the beginning of the pandemic. U.S. air travel began plummeting in March and continued falling into April. On the slowest day (April 14), the Transportation Security Administration screened fewer than 90,000 travelers nationwide. The agency had screened more than 2.1 million travelers on the same day in 2019.

As spring progressed, however, travel volumes increased, and by the beginning of July, outgoing passenger screenings had surpassed 700,000. And for much of the summer and early fall, that became the new normal: TSA typically screened between 700,000 and nearly one million passengers each day, although screenings didn’t crack the one million mark until the middle of October.

These numbers are about 35% what they were in 2019, but Paulos Lakew, who follows airport trends as a director with Unison Consulting, said that there is still reason for optimism, at least in the short term.

“Although U.S. carriers have cut seat capacity for the upcoming holiday season due to weak air travel demand, airline schedules for November show an improvement from the deeper year-over-year declines in October and September schedules,” Lakew said.

The longer term outlook is murkier. Leisure travel continues to outpace business travel, and it accounts for most of the passengers currently filling airplane seats, Lakew said. A key indicator will be the number of people flying for work and how often, he said.

“Business trip frequency could remain low if there’s a lasting shift away from in-person meetings,” said Lakew. “The consensus among industry experts and trade groups is that air travel demand can be expected to recover to pre-pandemic levels by around 2024.”

Lakew was quick to remind me that TSA screenings are not a perfect proxy for all airline travel—passengers who change planes for connecting flights, for example, do not get screened again. However, they are a useful barometer for the travel sector during these uncertain times.

As with previous entries in APM Research Lab’s airport-tracking series, we’ve compiled a searchable database of U.S. airports to show how passenger volumes have changed over time. Select an airport in the field below to see how screenings compare to the year before.

For my part, my flight home was much less anxiety-provoking than I expected. Everything about the process—from clearing security to boarding the plane to getting my luggage—was much slower and more methodical than I’d ever experienced, but having all the middle seats unoccupied was quite comfortable, and, by and large, people were very respectful of personal space.

What really matters is that I made it home without getting sick. And that, in and of itself, is worth a lot.

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