HARLINGEN — Valley International Airport officials say they haven’t seen passenger numbers like those of the past three months in 14 years.
The airport, benefiting from pent-up demand following the travel downturn during the COVID-19 pandemic, posted more than 40,000 enplaned passengers in March and April, and then 39,294 passengers in the month of May.
“That’s how far you have to go back to see these kinds of numbers,” Marv Esterly, director of aviation at VIA, told the airport board Tuesday evening. “It’s very exciting.”
“Overall, we were up 64 percent over last year” for May, he added. “We’re up 78 percent for the year.”
The surge in passenger enplanements has been led by Southwest Airlines, which has increased its number of flights in and out of VIA to eight per day. Southwest enplaned 22,819 passengers in May, an increase of 131.7 percent over May 2021.
Also surging at the airport is American Airlines, which enplaned 8,039 passengers, a 44.7-percent increase compared to last year.
So far the problems American is having with recruiting adequate numbers of pilots and crew members has not affected service at VIA. This week, American announced it was discontinuing service to three cities in upstate New York due to staff shortages.
“There’s no chance of them walking away from us now? They just announced they’re closing down three cities,” asked board member Col. Christopher S. Dowling.
“I would say you never say never, but not only are we producing for them … but we do all the marketing for them,” Esterly replied. “Everything we get back from them, is. ‘Hey, no one does this for us. You guys are knocking it out of the park.’ There are a lot of other cities across the United States that would go off the list before we would.”
Ranking third in passenger enplanements for May was United Airlines with 4,465 passengers, a 7.4-percent increase over last year, followed by Frontier Airlines with 2,558 passengers, a 257.7 percent increase over May 2021, due primarily to adding direct flights to and from Orlando and Las Vegas.
Delta Air Lines is mostly a seasonal player at VIA and recorded no passengers during the month of May. Delta, too, is struggling with having an adequate number of pilots and crew members for its flights.
“Delta is like United, maybe worse, in struggling with crew and pilots,” Esterly said. “They had five flights a week at over 90 percent (capacity). I guarantee you that if they could do it, they would be doing it.”
Cargo tonnage flown in and out by Fedex, Southwest and DHL was down 12.4 percent in May, reflecting last year’s heavy demand for the delivery of online products during the height of the pandemic, airport officials say.
