2 million in a month: Austin's airport marks passenger milestone again this year

For the second time this year — but only the second time in its 23-year history — Austin-Bergstrom International Airport broke the 2 million mark in monthly passenger volume.

The air travel hub hosted 2,002,078 passengers in October, which was a 31.6% increase over the number of flyers in the same month last year. November figures have not yet been released.

The October 2022 passenger volume obliterated the previous October record set in 2019, when 1,571,056 traveled through Austin-Bergstrom before the COVID-19 pandemic.

Passenger traffic has been rebounding since May 2021 from anemic totals amid the pandemic. The increasing volume of flyers in 2022 could lead to the airport’s busiest year ever.

Here are five more high-flying facts about Austin’s bustling airport:

1. Airport had its busiest day ever in October.

Austin-Bergstrom served a record number of passengers in the wake of the annual U.S. Grand Prix Formula One race at Circuit of the Americas, as more than 43,000 people traveled through the airport on Oct. 24, airport officials said.

The total of 43,177 passengers was a 22% jump over the airport's previous daily record, which had occurred just a week earlier, when 35,357 passengers traveled through the airport on Oct. 17, the day after the Austin City Limits Music Festival concluded.

For context, the airport's staff consider any day with more than 26,000 departing passengers a high-volume day.

2. The busiest month used to be July, but not this year.

The number of passengers served by Austin-Bergstrom International Airport surpassed 2 million in a single month for the first time in the facility's history in May. A record-setting total of 2,021,747 passengers traveled through the airport, an increase of about 82.7% from May 2021.

Although spikes in passenger traffic occur for major annual events such as the South by Southwest festivals in March, Formula One racing in October and Thanksgiving travel in November, it's summer vacations and family trips that had perennially made July the airport’s busiest month, officials have said.

Before the coronavirus pandemic, the all-time monthly record for passenger volume was set in July 2019, when more than 1.64 million people traveled through the airport. That number exceeded the previous monthly record — set in June 2019 — by only 33,619 travelers.

After COVID-19 vaccines became more widely available, Austin's airport saw a spike in air travel in July 2021, similar to previous years, with about 1.54 million passengers. But a surge in COVID-19 cases that summer, fueled by the delta variant of the coronavirus, caused a slowdown in international and domestic travel.

Passenger volume at Austin's airport ended up peaking for the year last December with about 1.6 million travelers that month.

3. Austin's airport is already having its busiest year ever.

Airport officials have not released November figures yet, but from January to October this year, Austin-Bergstrom has seen about 17.5 million passengers go through its gates. That's the highest number of passengers since before the pandemic, when the airport recorded its busiest year ever in 2019 with about 17.3 million passengers.

In 2020, air travel took a nosedive in March as the pandemic took hold in the Austin area. The coronavirus stalled demand for air travel and the airport counted only about 6.5 million travelers that year — the fewest since it opened in 1999.

Passenger traffic in 1999 — the year Robert Mueller Municipal Airport in East Austin closed and Austin-Bergstrom opened on the site of the former Bergstrom Air Force Base in May — was about 6.67 million travelers.

Last year, airport officials cited higher vaccination rates, rising passenger confidence and increasing demand for air travel to declare that Austin-Bergstrom had its fourth-busiest year ever in 2021. A total of 13,570,711 passengers traveled through the airport, a 109.7% increase from the previous year.

4. Southwest is the airport's most popular carrier.

For the first 10 months of 2022, about 6.7 million passengers flew on Southwest Airlines, up 89.5% from the same period last year; about 4.5 million flew on American Airlines, an increase of 91.3%; and about 2 million flyers used Delta Air Lines, which was 40.4% more than last year.

The next three popular carriers were: United Airlines with 1.8 million travelers, Alaska Airlines with 777,089 passengers, and Spirit Airlines with 484,231 flyers.

5. Cargo loads have increased, too.

From January to October this year, about 260.3 million pounds of air cargo moved through Austin-Bergstrom. In all of 2021, the airport handled about 239 million pounds of cargo, which was up 8.7% from 2020.

International air cargo made up 14.5 million pounds of all freight, up 326.26% from last year, when international air cargo totaled only about 4.67 million pounds.

The loads included 74.3 million pounds carried by Air Transport International, 71.2 millions pounds for Federal Express, and about 32 million pounds ferried by United Parcel Service, officials reported.

This article originally appeared on Austin American-Statesman: 2 million: Austin's airport marks passenger milestone again this year