Airline travel increasing across the country. Is Washington back to pre-pandemic levels?
Editor’s note: This story and visualization are part of our new “Data In Your Life” series, in which we mine public databases to tell quick stories about the world around us.
Many facets of daily life were impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic, from individual routines like working from home to businesses limiting their hours.
Some industries hit hard by the pandemic slowdown are still on the road to recovery. One such industry is transportation, specifically air travel.
Avionics International called it a never-before-seen dramatic, sustained decline in demand. For months, airlines were operating at an 80-95% reduced capacity. Some shut down completely for a time.
In Washington, air travel decreased drastically. In 2019, airlines saw 54.4 million passengers flying to or from Washington, according to data from the U.S. Department of Transportation. One year later, that number had dropped to 20.9 million passengers.
Sunday, July 7, saw a record three million travelers go through American airports.
After a couple years of depressed travel numbers following the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, more Americans than ever before are taking to the skies. But not all states have returned to pre-pandemic levels of air travel yet.
Are WA airlines recovering post-COVID?
In Washington, airport traffic fell 61% in 2020 from the year before. But with distribution of the COVID-19 vaccine beginning in December 2020, travel restrictions began to relax and more people started traveling.
The U.S. Department of Transportation publishes data on the number of passengers flying to or from a given airport. This chart shows the number of passengers who flew to or from a Washington airport from 2019 to 2023.
Airports in the Evergreen State saw numbers pick back up fairly quickly, with 38 million passengers recorded in 2021. The following year, the rates continued to rise to 48.6 million.
Several years later, airport traffic has bounced back but still isn’t quite back to pre-pandemic levels in Washington – the same as in 24 other states.
In 2023, Washington’s airport traffic was down 0.9% since 2019, or about 400,000 passengers.
Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas said in a statement that he expects the current record breaking travel to continue in the coming months.
With half of the country returning to pre-pandemic air travel rates, it’s possible Washington will soon join those ranks.
