U.S. Airports Grapple With Reversal of Fortunes as Long Bumpy Ride Awaits

McCarran International Airport in Las Vegas in 2019 had its busiest year ever, handling more than 51 million passengers. And this year, it was on track to beat that, with traffic in the first two months of 2020 up more than 6 percent compared with the same months in 2020. And then a virus began to spread. Traffic plunged, and by April, the airport saw only a little more than 150,000 passengers for the entire month. That was nearly as much traffic as it received in a single day in 2019, 140,000 passengers. The volumes have since rebounded as travel restrictions around the country have eased, and as travelers eager for summer vacations have flocked to leisure destinations. But the outlook for the fall isn’t encouraging. Las Vegas is hardly unique. The contours of this story hold true for almost every airport in the U.S., as travel plunged, began to recover, and softened again, following the trajectory of the pandemic. The irony is that the months before the pandemic struck were b