Sea-Tac Airport usually sees about 50,000 passengers daily. Right now it’s about 2,500
If you want a sense of the scope of just how many people are staying home to stop the spread of the coronavirus, look no farther than the latest air-traffic figures from Seattle-Tacoma International Airport.
In an update provided Thursday on its website, the airport shared its travel data for March, showing that while air cargo had seen a boost, passenger traffic was down 56 percent for that month.
Early indications are that April figures will be even more dramatic, with the airport reporting that unofficial figures from the first half of this month showing passenger travel down as much as 95 percent.
“The airport is serving only 2,500 departing passengers per day when we would normally see over 50,000 this time of year,” the airport noted in its post.
Additionally, 321 international departures were canceled in March.
Along with the dramatic decline in air travel, airport businesses have provided the state’s Employment Security Department with a stream of layoff notices.
According to the airport, more than 300 businesses with more than 19,000 workers had been active at Sea-Tac. Now, more than two-thirds of the dining and retail tenants at the airport are shut down.
March figures for the airport were as follows:
▪ Total passengers: 1,824,676 compared with 4,111,729 passengers during March 2019.
▪ International passenger traffic: 183,528, compared with 446,530 international passengers in March 2019.
Overall air cargo was up 0.9 percent in March over the previous year, with air freight (excluding airmail) up 2.4 percent.
“This was driven primarily by the performance of ecommerce and express air freight such as Amazon, DHL and FedEx which drove domestic air freight up 16.6 percent,” Sea-Tac noted.
International air freight was down 24.1 percent “because of the reduction in ‘belly cargo’ from international passenger flight cancellations.”
It noted that international freighter operations remained steady, responsible for about 40 percent of international air cargo.
For perspective, at the end of 2019, the airport had seen 51.8 million passengers for year, up from 49.8 million in 2018.
This story was originally published April 23, 2020 at 1:27 PM.
