Sacramento airport to get $50 million federal stimulus. What it needs now are fliers

The big summer air travel season is about to ... probably not happen.

A few months ago, Sacramento International Airport was planning for the busiest months in its history, when more than a million passengers a month would pour in and out of jets to and from New York, New Orleans, Orlando and elsewhere. A major runway upgrade had just been finished. New concessionaires were in place in remodeled Terminal A. Officials were talking about constructing new departure and arrival gates to meet demand.

Now, those officials face a different issue: How to get busy again?

Passenger levels have plummeted 94 percent in slightly more than one month during the coronavirus pandemic as the Sacramento and national economies went into a springtime hibernation. Airlines For America on Sunday reported only 17 passengers on average per domestic flight last week.

Not only is the commercial aviation industry among the hardest hit, it may be one of the slowest industries to come back. Recent national polls show that would-be fliers may be unwilling to board a tightly packed airline this summer and possibly beyond.

For Sacramento County’s main airport, which had been on a historic eight-year upswing, the challenge is immediate.

“This is a ‘black swan’ event,” Sacramento airports director Cindy Nichol said, referencing an economic event so rare that could not be predicted. “How do we restore confidence in travel among passengers? That is industry-wide issue we are working on now.”

It’s the third major trauma for air travel in the last 20 years.

The Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist hijackings led to stringent security, notably new Transportation Security Administration checkpoint protocols that had an indelible effect on the flying experience.

The Great Recession dented the economy so deeply that it reduced flying numbers at Sacramento airport by 20 percent for several years, and led to airline consolidations and unbundled fee structures that have complicated flying.

Nichol, though, says what’s happening now could be worse for the industry in comparison. Airport and county officials have formed a task force to look for steps the county overall can take to recover.

The airport notably will receive $49.9 million in financial assistance as part of the federal government’s CARES Act emergency stimulus.

That serves as a pressure release valve, allowing the airport to cover three months of expenses, help pay its still-hefty debt service from construction of the Terminal B main building and concourse building in 2011, and allowed it to provide rent relief for airport concessions, Nichol said.

How the airport is moving forward

The airport has avoided layoffs, Nichol said, and also is moving ahead with rebuilding and modernizing its fire station and doing some taxi paving.

The airport is undergoing some small physical changes as a result of the coronavirus, including installing shields at ticket counters, similar to those that have been added in recent weeks at supermarket checkout areas to separate airport and airline employees from fliers.

“We’re talking about masks and gloves, we’re cleaning ‘touch points.’ We may take out every other restaurant table. We are adding 6-foot marks (on the floor) in queues so that people will be distanced from each other,” she said.

In the near term, the numbers of returning passengers in the next year are expected to be low enough that there will be room for people at the TSA checkpoints to line up 6 feet apart. But as flier numbers ramp up, and if “social distancing” becomes the norm, Sacramento and other airports may run into space constraints at the checkpoint.

In the last week, Southwest, Delta, Frontier, JetBlue and American Airlines announced they will begin requiring passengers to wear masks this week or next.

Southwest, the largest carrier at the Sacramento airport, disclosed last week it has grounded half of its airline fleet indefinitely. The airline and others, notably, are still flying about half as many routes as before the pandemic, even though passenger numbers have dropped dramatically.

Major investor Berkshire Hathaway, an influential stock market player, divested itself last week of its airlines shares at a loss, saying it doesn’t not see the industry looking strong again for some time.

Speaking to CBS on Sunday, Southwest CEO Gary Kelly said his company is doing what it can to encourage people to fly now, including reducing per-flight bookings to give fliers some social distancing space.

“We’re not going to remove middle seats or prohibit people from sitting in middle seats,” he said on “Face the Nation.” “But at the same time, we won’t book the airplanes full. So ... if you choose, all the middle seats can be open.”

Kelly said the summer travel season won’t be what it once was, but booking has been increasing slowly for May since the March/April plummet.

“I don’t think June will be a good month, but hopefully it will be a bit better than May,” he said. “And then we’re looking forward to July and August, and we’ll just have to see. There are bookings in place. But those could easily be canceled. So it’s really one day at a time.”