RDU airport’s slow recovery from COVID-19 pandemic faces fall headwinds
Lured in part by cheap airfare, people are slowly returning to Raleigh-Durham International Airport despite the COVID-19 pandemic, but airport officials don’t expect the upward trend to last.
The week ending Aug. 10 was the busiest at RDU since the airline business bottomed out in mid-April. The Transportation Security Administration screened 41,670 departing passengers that week, up 6.4% from the week before.
But that’s still 74.2% fewer passengers than the same week last year, airport president Michael Landguth told members of the Airport Authority on Thursday. With more than 40,000 new coronavirus cases reported each day across the country, people are still reluctant to travel by air and most business travel has been suspended or canceled.
“With corporate travel down, most of the traffic is leisure travel with passengers taking advantage of low air fares and flying in greater numbers during the summer months,” Landguth said in a written statement. “We expect to see the number of travelers flatten or fall with the start of the school year.”
July is traditionally RDU’s busiest month for travelers. This year, 154,859 passengers departed RDU in July, down 77.1% compared to a year ago.
Still, that was 46.7% more than in June and more than seven times as many who flew out of the airport in April. Airport officials say they saw a slight bump in the early August, but the week ending Aug. 10 is the high point so far, with traffic falling off the following week.
Airlines have adjusted to the lower demand. Before the pandemic, they averaged more than 400 flights a day from RDU to 57 nonstop destinations. So far this August, RDU has averaged 79 daily departures to 29 nonstop destinations.
And airlines continue to tinker with their schedules. Southwest Airlines, for example, resumed daily nonstops to Austin and Houston on Aug. 11, only to announce that in September it will cut the nonstop flight to Houston.
The changes in schedules have shuffled the volume of passengers the airlines serve from RDU. Delta Air Lines, once the airport’s busiest carrier, used to handle nearly a third of all passengers from the Triangle. In July, Delta accounted for 15.8% of passengers, behind Southwest with 27.2% and American with 33.1%.
United, Spirit, Frontier, Alaska, JetBlue and Allegiant combined to carry the remaining 24% of passengers. Air Canada hasn’t had any flights into or out of RDU since international travel was restricted due to COVID-19 in March.
Airlines and airports have made numerous changes in how they handle their customers and clean their planes and waiting areas in hopes of making people feel safe and comfortable flying again. All carriers at RDU require passengers and employees to wear masks throughout their flights, and often in waiting areas as well, and have become more aggressive about enforcement.
RDU expects 2.8 million passengers to board flights in the Triangle in the fiscal year that began April 1. For that to happen, business will need to pick up significantly this fall and winter.
Airport officials celebrate any signs that air travel is recovering. Two restaurants, California Pizza Kitchen and Whisky River, and two retail stores, Root & Branch and InMotion, recently reopened in Terminal 2, in a sign they think passengers are returning.
And Delta plans to reopen its Sky Club passenger lounge in Terminal 2 on Sept. 3. The American Airlines Admirals Club has reopened as a customer service center but isn’t serving food, and the United Club, which just opened a year ago, remains closed.
Airport Authority member Dickie Thompson told fellow board members he recently flew from RDU and was pleasantly surprised by what he saw.
“It’s a lot more active than it was,” Thompson said. “It’s not busy, but it’s better.”
This story was originally published August 21, 2020 at 6:00 AM.
