Phoenix Sky Harbor International Airport heads into busiest holiday travel season ever
Nov 12, 2024, 2:03 PM
expand Planes come and go at Sky Harbor International Airport on the morning of May 1, 2024. (Jim Poulin/Phoenix Business Journal)
(Jim Poulin/Phoenix Business Journal)
Phoenix Sky Harbor International Airport is not only pacing to have its busiest year ever in 2024, but the upcoming holiday travel season will also have more flights than ever before, according to data analyzed by the Business Journals from Cirium, an airline analytics company.
In the final quarter of 2024, there are 56,076 total commercial aviation flights scheduled to take off from Sky Harbor, according to Cirium. That represents a 9% increase from the combined number of flights at Sky Harbor in October, November and December 2023 and a 16% increase from the number of flights out of Sky Harbor in the fourth quarter of 2019.
Several airports around the country have still not recovered from the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020, but Sky Harbor has far exceeded pre-Covid levels in both the number of flights at the airport as well as passenger count.
In the fourth quarter of this year, only six airports in the U.S. – Atlanta, Chicago O’Hare, Dallas/Fort Worth, Denver, Charlotte and Los Angeles – have more flights scheduled than Sky Harbor, but Phoenix’s airport has a larger percentage increase in fourth-quarter flights compared to 2019 than all those airports.
With the increase in flights, Sky Harbor will also have more seats available than last year. For the fourth quarter, Sky Harbor is scheduled to have just under 8.3 million seats on flights departing from the airport. that is a 7% increase from the same period in 2023 and a 21% increase from Q4 2019.
This story is posted in partnership with Phoenix Business Journal. Click to read the full story.
