Travel falls 90% at Washington’s busiest airport - a 50-year low, Port of Seattle says
If you’re traveling by airplane to or from Seattle this Memorial Day weekend, the airport might look a bit like a ghost town.
The Port of Seattle released a report detailing the difference in the number of travelers this year compared to April 2019 and the impact of the pandemic is clear, according to the agency’s website. Seattle-Tacoma International Airport— Washington’s busiest airport — saw passenger volume drop to a 53-year low, Port of Seattle said.
“About 260,000 passengers traveled through SEA in April of 2020, which is a decrease of 93.6 percent from the same month last year,” the Port of Seattle said in a news release.
The Port doesn’t expect travel to increase much this month at Sea-Tac — “forecasts show passenger volume increasing slightly… with as many as 8,000 departing” on the airport’s historically busiest days, the release said. May of last year had an average of nearly 53,000 departures, according to the Port.
Paine Field in Everett has also seen air travel heavily impacted by the pandemic, KING 5 reported. Because of that, Propeller Airports, which operates the passenger terminal at Paine Field, decided to suspend passenger services from today until Aug. 1 to conduct maintenance and repairs, according to KING 5.
The drop in travel at Washington’s airports is consistent with TSA checkpoint travel numbers for all U.S. airports for 2020 and 2019. The number of passengers going through TSA checkpoints on May 21 was 318,449, compared to 2.6 million travelers on May 21, 2019 — an 89% drop — according to the agency’s website.
