The Piedmont Triad Airport Authority – the board that runs Piedmont Triad International Airport (PTIA) – usually meets toward the end of each month; however, this month, thanks to Thanksgiving, the board met on Tuesday, Nov.15. That meant the Authority released its passenger and cargo statistics a little earlier than usual – and those new statistics, for the month of October, show very slight gains in passenger traffic over October of 2021.

Passenger traffic was up 3 percent in October 2022 over October of the previous year.

The year-to-date numbers through October of 2022 compared with the year-to- date numbers in 2021 reveal a steeper increase in the number of passengers flying in and out of PTIA. Year-to-date, passenger traffic this year was up 34 percent over 2021.

The airport still hasn’t reached a major milestone it’s been shooting for: PTIA officials want to see passenger traffic surpass pre-pandemic levels. While flyers have been coming back now that COVID-19 is receding, there’s still quite a way to go before that happens. The number of passengers using PTIA in October 2022 was 25 percent below the number from October of 2019.

In other stats released by the Airport Authority Tuesday, the amount of cargo going in and out of PTIA was down 4 percent in October 2022 compared with October 2021, but up 4 percent year-to-date.

Cargo for October 2022, compared to October of 2019 was up 24 percent. The total number of departing seats scheduled for December 2022 is 83,268. That’s down 7 percent when compared with December 2021, and down 26 percent compared with December 2019.

Also, the “load factor” – the average percentage of airplane seats departing from PTIA that were filled with passengers – was 85 percent in July 2022 . That’s 6 percentage points higher than July of 2021 and 5 points higher than July 2019.

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