The airline industry and airport operations around the country have come a very long way since the depths of the COVID-19 pandemic – and that trend continued to be evident in new stats released by Piedmont Triad International Airport (PTIA) on Tuesday, May 24.

The Piedmont Triad Airport Authority, the board that runs the airport, releases the latest stats after each monthly meeting on the fourth Tuesday of every month. The stats put out in late May reflect numbers collected through the end of April 2022.

For the month of April, the number of passengers flying in and out of PTIA was up an impressive 92 percent in 2022 over April of 2021. That’s good news for the airport, as is the fact that passenger numbers through the end of April were up 112 percent year to date versus the first four months of 2021.

While all that’s good news, the just-released stats show that the airport is still not operating at pre-pandemic levels. PTIA Executive Director Kevin Baker, who presents the stats to the Airport Authority each month, likes to compare the newest numbers to those of 2019 in order to get a look at how the airport is doing compared to its pre- pandemic days. The answer this month is that PTIA is not back to its good old days’ levels: The number of passengers for April 2022 versus 2019 was down 25 percent.

In other stats released this week:

• The amount of cargo was down 3 percent in April 2022 over April 2021, and up 5 percent year to date. Cargo for April 2022 versus April 2019 was up 32 percent.

• The number of total departing seats out of PTIA airport – filled or unfilled – for June 2022 was 87,842, up 5 percent over June 2021 and down 26 percent over June 2019.

• Load factor – the average percentage of airplane seats departing from PTIA that were filled with passengers – was 62 percent in February 2022. That load factor is 7 percentage points higher than February of 2021, and 7 points lower than February 2019.

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