Southwest Airlines helps Fresno airport reach new heights, passenger stats show
Throughout the western U.S., few airports are rebounding from a pandemic-induced slump in air travel faster than Fresno Yosemite International Airport.
Almost 800,000 passengers boarded domestic flights from Fresno in the 12-month period from December 2020 through November 2021. That’s an increase of about 81% compared to about 439,000 passengers who flew during the prior 12 months, including the summer of 2020 when almost all air travel ground to a halt because of COVID-19.
The latest data on passenger counts was released this week by the U.S. Department of Transportation’s Bureau of Transportation Statistics.
Fresno’s airport didn’t have the largest number of passengers in the Federal Aviation Administration’s Western Pacific Region encompassing California, Arizona, Nevada, Hawaii, and Pacific island territories such as Guam and American Samoa.
But among 22 of the busiest airports in the FAA region, only two airports in the tourist-magnet state of Hawaii experienced larger percentage increases in passengers from one year to the next.
The airport itself released its own internal statistics for the 2021 calendar year, reporting a 104.3% increase in enplaned passengers aboard domestic flights, from 415,234 in 2020 to 848,341 last year. That’s only about 5,000 shy of the previous annual record of about 853,000 in 2019, the last full year before the pandemic.
Air travel from Fresno last year peaked in July, when federal data reported a record 100,436 passengers aboard departing flights, shattering the previous monthly record.
There was also an increase of almost 55% in passenger volumes aboard international flights from Fresno to cities in Mexico in 2021 compared to 2020, the airport reported.
Southwest driving growth factor
Among the factors in the increase is a general recovery in pent-up travel demand among passengers in 2021 after months of a travel and economic lockdown spurred by the global coronavirus pandemic.
Specific to Fresno, however, was the entry of Southwest Airlines into the Fresno market in April with daily flights to Las Vegas and Denver. On its own, Southwest carried almost 90,000 departing passengers from its arrival in late April through November, the federal Department of Transportation reported.
That’s almost 14% of all domestic passengers aboard flights departing from Fresno during that eight-month span of 2021.
The number of airline flights to and from Fresno also increased significantly last year compared to 2020. From December 2020 through November 2021, there were 12,083 departing flights, up more than 34% from fewer than 9,000 in the first year of the pandemic.
TSA screening data
The airport also reported this week that based on data from the U.S. Transportation Security Administration (the people who make you take off your belts and shoes run your bags through X-ray machines), Fresno was among the leading airports for recovering passengers in the west.
A consultant for Fresno Yosemite International Airport crunched TSA daily and hourly screening data for airports in California, Alaska, Hawaii, Nevada, Oregon and Washington for a 12-month period through January 2022.
The results prompted the airport to boast on Twitter: “You’ve made your airport – Fresno Yosemite International Airport the leader in passenger recovery in the entire Pacific Region! We thank you.”
“While not perfect in representing exact passengers, this data measures the volumes of persons screened at an airport’s TSA checkpoints,” said Vikkie Calderon, an airport spokeswoman.
This story was originally published February 11, 2022 at 3:30 PM.
