Piedmont Triad International Airport saw a solid rise in passenger traffic last month, according to the latest numbers presented at the Tuesday, Oct. 28 Airport Authority Board meeting.  That’s the board that oversees and ultimately calls the shots at the airport.

Passengers in and out of PTI were up 7 percent in September compared to the same month in 2024 and up 4 percent year to date.

Cargo also showed a modest 4 percent gain over last September – though it remains down 8 percent year to date.

The total number of scheduled departing seats for November 2025 is up 6 percent from November 2024, and PTI’s load factor – the percentage of airplane seats filled with passengers – stood at 83 percent for July 2025.  (That stat comes in at a slower pace than the others.)

The continued increase in passenger numbers is one more sign in a string of many that PTI may finally be climbing out of the hole dug by the pandemic.

Piedmont Triad International Airport, which has no international passenger flights by the way, hasn’t quite been the same since 2019; however, earlier this year PTI Executive Director Kevin Baker said 2025 might finally be the year he’s been hoping for – the year the airport gets passenger traffic back up and over where it was before Covid severely damaged the airline business.

In 2019, PTI hit a high-water mark after years of passenger growth. That year over 2.14 million passengers flew in and out of the airport.

Then, of course, the pandemic hit, and – just like every other airport in the country – PTI took a major hit. Flights were slashed, terminals emptied out and passenger traffic all but collapsed.

In the spring of 2020, things hit bottom: May of that year was the lowest month on record in modern history for PTI – down 92 percent compared to May 2019. Virtually no one was flying. Baker told the Rhino Times that month that one day there were more people working at the PTI terminal than there were passengers passing through it.

Ever since then the airport has been clawing its way back from the operating table. There were signs of life in 2021 and 2022, and a decent rebound in 2023 – with nearly 1.76 million passengers flying that year.

But, even then, it was still a few hundred thousand shy of that 2019 figure of 2,145,929.

Baker said in July that the numbers from the first half of 2025 suggest that this will likely be the year PTI finally gets back to that pre-Covid level.

In 2024, the total was 1,959,182 passengers.

The latest cargo uptick last month was a good sign. While freight boomed during the pandemic – driven largely by so much online shopping – that trend has since cooled. In 2021 and 2022, the airport handled more than 340 million pounds of cargo.

However, by 2024, that fell to just under 192 million pounds – a figure more in line with pre-Covid levels.

Everyone knows about the major success of the aviation megasite at the PTI, but the place is going through other changes as well. Plans are in the works for substantial concourse upgrades and improvements meant to enhance passenger experience. It’s part of a broader effort to make PTI more competitive and more attractive – not just for flyers in the Greensboro area, but also for those throughout the entire region who have been choosing to fly out of Raleigh or Charlotte.

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