Flight activity at Westchester County Airport is following the same climbing path that is becoming apparent for the entire domestic aviation industry. In addition to growing numbers of operations, fights to more destinations are being offered.
United Airlines has resumed a daily flight each way between Westchester and Chicago O”™Hare International Airport and may be adding more flights between the two.
In addition to promoting its service to O”™Hare, which had been the world”™s busiest airport until it was knocked out of the top slot and into second place last year by Atlanta Hartsfield-Jackson International, United has been promoting service from Westchester, through O”™Hare, to destinations such as San Francisco and Denver.
Wheels Up, a company that typically offers on-demand flights, is offering “pay by the seat” shuttle service between Westchester and Nantucket for the summer season. It has started offering daily round trip flights between Westchester and Nantucket Memorial Airport through Labor Day weekend. The route will be flown using King Air 350i twin-turboprop aircraft.
Data obtained by the Business Journal reveal that the total airport operations, takeoffs and landings, at Westchester rose in May to 12,245, up from the 10,045 that had been reported as the recovery was accelerating in April. The May number represents a dramatic increase from the 6,655 operations reported for February. Those numbers compare with a peak before the pandemic in July of 2019 of just over 16,000 operations. So far for the year, there have been 47,439 operations at the Westchester County Airport.
Most of the traffic at Westchester was corporate and light general aviation aircraft, both of which have essentially recovered from the pandemic and were back operating at close to 2019 levels.
Nationally, the government”™s Transportation Security Administration (TSA) reported that on June 11 it screened 2,028,961 people at the nation”™s airports, representing 74% of the travel volume on the same day in pre-pandemic 2019. It was an increase of 1.5 million from the number of passengers screened on June 11, 2020.
Before the pandemic hit, TSA was screening on average from 2 million to 2.5 million travelers each day. The lowest screening volume was recorded on April 13, 2020, when just 87,534 passengers were cleared to fly on the limited number of flights that were being operated.
The airlines themselves have been reporting better financial pictures recently, according to the Bureau of Transportation Statistics. For the first quarter of 2021, the industry reported an after-tax net loss of $4.2 billion and a pre-tax operating loss of $12.7 billion. This year”™s first-quarter $4.2 billion was reduced from last year”™s fourth-quarter loss of $7.0 billion. The first-quarter pre-tax operating loss of $12.7 billion was increased from the fourth-quarter loss of $9.7 billion.
U.S. airlines carried 41.2 million systemwide scheduled service passengers in March of this year according to BTS, up 29.6% from February. BTS reported 37.8 million of them were domestic passengers and 3.4 million international passengers.
The industry trade group Airlines for America reported that as of early June, the number of domestic flights was down 22% from pre-pandemic levels and the number of international flights was down 39%. That”™s much better than the situation was a year ago when domestic flights were down by more than 70% and international flights were off by about 90%.
The planes that have been flying recently have been fairly full. The weekly average load factor in early June on U.S. domestic flights was at 84.1%, just slightly below where it was in 2019.
