In the recent weeks, we’ve seen that the some airlines have slashed their flying capacity by as much as 100%. In fact, about 100 airlines have completely slashed capacity while they ride out these chaotic times and others have had huge capacity cuts near 80%.
But what about passenger traffic?
Well, as you might expect, there has been a 90% decrease in passengers traveling by air as compared to this time last year.
TSA checkpoint security numbers show that 184,027 people passed through TSA checkpoints Saturday and 199,644 Friday. If you examine these same days last year, you would find that 2.1 million and 2.5 million people respectively passed through TSA checkpoints.
That is a staggering loss of passengers but comes at no surprise given all of the travel advisories and mandatory quarantines that have been issued around the country and that are being issued every day.
Airlines like American Airlines have predicted increased cuts for the month of May so it looks like airlines are anticipating these record low capacity rates to continue through April and May.
Hopefully, we will see up ticks as we approach June but that all depends on how effectively we can “flatten” the curve as a nation.
China has already began to resume some of its international flights with its major airlines. Air China resumed flying to Frankfurt Chengdu after a 21-day suspension and China Southern Airlines resumed flights to the Kenyan capital of Nairobi from Guangzhou.
So I think the United States carriers have somewhat of a roadmap as to how to ease back into opening up routes but we will see how they choose to open things back up.
Daniel Gillaspia is the Founder of UponArriving.com and the credit card app, WalletFlo. He is a former attorney turned travel expert covering destinations along with TSA, airline, and hotel policies. Since 2014, his content has been featured in publications such as National Geographic, Smithsonian Magazine, and CNBC. Read my bio.