The onset of the COVID-19 pandemic hit the airline industry particularly hard. Thousands of flights were canceled. In some cases, entire aircraft fleets were parked and mothballed.
Even now, air passenger traffic in the U.S. has yet to recover. For example, 2,396,663 people passed through TSA airport checkpoints on Oct. 13, 2022. That’s more than double the number of passengers on Oct. 13, 2020, but it’s still down more than 7 percent compared with Oct. 13, 2019.