Skift Take
Even if Congress coughs up another $10 billion in aid to airports, the future looks murky. With airlines planning to contract, it's likely that some smaller airports could lose air service altogether.
McCarran International Airport in Las Vegas in 2019 had its busiest year ever, handling more than 51 million passengers. And this year, it was on track to beat that, with traffic in the first two months of 2020 up more than 6 percent compared with the same months in 2020. And then a virus began to spread.
Traffic plunged, and by April, the airport saw only a little more than 150,000 passengers for the entire month. That was nearly as much traffic as it received in a single day in 2019, 140,000 passengers. The volumes have since rebounded as travel restrictions around the country have eased, and as travelers eager for summer vacations have flocked to leisure destinations. But the outlook for the fall isn’t encouraging.
Las Vegas is hardly unique. The contours of this story hold true for almost every airport in the U.S., as travel plunged, began to recover, and softened again, following the trajectory of the pandemic. The irony is that the months before the pandemic struck were boom times for airports. After all, the U.S. airline industry was the strongest and most profitable in the world for the better part of a decade.
Since the airline industry's consolidation, which coincided with the economic expansion after the 2008 financial crisis, traffic and capacity growth were steady if not spectacular. Airports did see hundreds of new aircraft serving hundreds of new routes, some launched by ambitious foreign carriers.
Boom Times
Many airports and the communities they serve enjoyed first-time-ever nonstop links to lots of new cities. This emboldened airports to break ground on new terminal projects and other infrastructure programs. But now, much of that new air service is gone. And it might never come back. International routes, especially, are subject to much lower demand for perhaps another three or four years. The industry trade group IATA, for one, expects international traffic to reach 2019 levels only in 2024. This leaves airports wondering what comes next.
In the short term, it’s a waiting game. The CARES Act stimulus mandated that airlines continue operating to all the destinations the
