Sacramento airport’s comeback continues, but COVID-19 spike could mean new travel slump
Sacramento International Airport has continued to bounce back from a devastating spring that saw the coronavirus pandemic all but shut down air travel in and out of California’s capital, but airport officials are now watching the state’s most recent rush of COVID-19 cases for signs of a new slump ahead.
“We have seen numbers slowly come back. It’s continued to trend that way, but the situation’s very dynamic,” airport spokeswoman Samantha Mott said Monday.
Coronavirus cases have topped 500,000 in California, for weeks an epicenter of the national contagion. Popular travel destinations including Hawaii and New York are clamping down instituting 14-day quarantines on incoming travelers.
Officials at Southwest Airlines, Sacramento International’s chief carrier, in a late-July statement announcing its second quarter earnings, said fliers will likely stay home until a COVID-19 vaccine or therapeutics are developed. Southwest CEO Gary Kelly, in the statement, said the airline “will adjust our flight schedule aggressively and frequently in response to this volatile demand environment.”
Southwest’s schedule out of Sacramento remains the same, but service from the Dallas-based carrier may slow down in September, Mott said.
The quarantine news has also led JetBlue to push back its planned service from Sacramento to New York’s Kennedy International, Mott said Monday.
“Southwest is a good barometer for what we’ll see overall” in Sacramento, Mott said. “Maybe we’ll see a dip, but we won’t be alone in that.”
Recent tallies, though, have been encouraging. Sacramento International saw about 6,800 passengers a day last week – nearly 7 percent above the national average for the week, Mott said. Sacramento International has held fast at 95 nonstop flights a day, more than half its pre-contagion 170 nonstops. but unchanged from June.
“We have seen passenger numbers grow,” Mott said.
Sacramento saw a rebound in passenger traffic in June, when nearly 300,000 people used the airport, but that is far below last year’s monthly totals. Sacramento International Airport is coming off a record year for passenger traffic in 2019, including a July in which a record 1.3 million people used the airport.
Oakland International Airport sounded its own COVID warning Friday, telling Bay Area television station KPIX that though the airport doubled the number of passenger flights from May, the East Bay airport’s numbers were far below where they should be in the typically high-traffic summer travel season.
“Due to the rise in COVID-19 within California and nationally, we remain concerned about the fragility of the air travel market,” said Bryan Francis, director of aviation at Oakland International Airport.
Oakland, too, has its eyes on Southwest. The airline had planned to bump up its flights at the airport to 90 a day from 75 before the new rise in cases last month and signals of weaker demand ahead in the fall, the Mercury News reported.
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