Well, the pundits were right.
They expected a record number of air travelers for the 4th of July weekend, and they got it.
Despite numerous delays and cancelations, people were not going to be denied their vacation. In fact, many media outlets reported more than 25,000 delays over the weekend. And as of Tuesday morning, as people scrambled to get back home for the holiday, there were more than 12,000 delays on Tuesday alone, according to FlightAware, as of 7:00 a.m. EDT.
Most of them appear to be weather-related as planes waited out the bad thunderstorms that have permeated the eastern half of the United States.
But that hasn’t stopped people from going on vacation.
Since May 2, there have been 54 consecutive days of 2 million or more passengers a day, according to the Transportation Security Administration (TSA). That includes the 2,882,915 passengers who the TSA screened on Friday, June 30, the most the agency has ever recorded since it began keeping records and breaking the single-day mark previously set on the Sunday after Thanksgiving in 2019.
Experts predicted more than 2 million people per day would fly during the holiday weekend. Thursday, June 29 saw 2.7 million, Saturday July 1 saw 2.5 million, Sunday, July 2 saw 2.5 million, Monday, July 3 saw 2.2 million and Tuesday, July 4 saw 2 million passengers screened by the TSA.
While the airlines expect passengers to remain at about 2 million per day, they don’t expect another surge in air travel until the end of summer and Labor Day weekend.
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