We were curious if the airline industry had successfully handled the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic, and the drop in travel that followed. To do this, we examined enplanement, which is the total amount of passengers put on flights, of over 350 major airports in the US, from 2019 to 2022.

The graph on the left examines the sum of total passengers in major US airports, in millions, by year. As COVID-19 hit in 2020, a drastic falloff was seen in total throughput, but over the next two years, numbers climbed close to prepandemic efforts.

The graph on the right looks at 5 of the busiest airports: Atlanta, Denver, Dallas, New York, and Chicago, and examines their throughput specifically. Similar to the bar chart, a clear drop was present in 2020, and in 2021 and 2022, the airports grew busier to approach their prepandemic numbers. One benefit from this format is we can see the way specific airports were affected - notably, that Atlanta International Airport took the largest dive, but also had the quickest recover in getting traffic back to normal.

Notably, this dataset, from the Federal Aviation Administration, only goes through 2022, so that remains a shortcoming, as we cannot see further if the impressive bounceback rate of airport throughput continues, or steadies out.