HARLINGEN — After nearly two years of travel disruption due to the pandemic and related responses, air passengers are releasing a pent-up desire to once again fly the skies.
At Valley International Airport, passenger numbers are not just back where they were before COVID-19 made its appearance, they’re better.
“It’s really amazing. We are definitely recovering and fairly quickly,” said Marv Esterly, director of aviation at Valley International. “Since October, the last three months at the end of 2021, were record months for us. … Those were record months in terms of enplaned passengers.”
The trend is happening across the aviation universe, at least in the United States. Recent security checkpoint numbers from the Transportation Security Administration show enplanements more than doubling this month compared to January 2021.
And while the numbers are still below 2019 and 2020, the trendline is obviously on the move as Americans feed travel desires tamped down during the long COVID-19 nightmare.
“We’re anticipating and being told that we’re going to see a huge influx this year of passenger seats in the market,” Esterly said. “Southwest is moving from four flights currently in the market daily to eight flights by June. So we’re doubling the amount of seats in the market by June here, so that’s actually two more flights a day than we had prior to the pandemic.”
United, American and Frontier all have new flights to and from Valley International, with the American flight to Chicago on Saturday beginning even earlier this season. Frontier is not only flying to Denver, but also schedules two flights a week to Orlando and Las Vegas.
The numbers are staggeringly improved over a year ago.
For instance, Southwest in December boarded 16,436 passengers flying out of VIA, compared to just 7,416 the same month in 2020, an increase of 121.6 percent.
United was up 31 percent, American rose by 28 percent, Sun Country was up 71 percent, and Frontier saw enplanement numbers which were 408 percent above those in December 2020.
Esterly said passenger traffic began to pick up about the time COVID-19 vaccines were becoming widely available.
“We had a stellar year when it came to the summer, from March through April all the way through August,” Esterly said. “We had a slight downturn, which is typical, in September, but October has just come back like gangbusters.
“October 2021 was 30,000 enplanements, people getting on aircraft, as opposed to 2020 where we saw 13,000 getting on the aircraft,” he added. “It’s really amazing. Even pre-pandemic numbers, when you look at that same month of October, we were at 24,000 and now we’re at 30,000, so it’s definitely moving in the right direction and things are really getting back to normal, even above normal.”
The trends for McAllen-Miller International Airport and Brownsville-South Padre Island International Airport track along with what VIA officials are seeing.
“There are a lot of seats in the market so we’re really hoping that we are seeing an end to this pandemic,” Esterly said. “I predict that, at least from what I’m seeing, is people are ready to fly and ready to move.”
“This Omicron doesn’t seem to be as lethal that way,” he added, “and a lot of people are vaccinated at this point and protected, and I think people are going to fly. We’re all banking on it.”
