US airports see busiest Sunday since before coronavirus pandemic, just 178 canceled flights
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The coronavirus pandemic isn’t officially over yet, but that hasn’t stopped millions of passengers from taking to the air the Sunday after Thanksgiving. According to CNNUS airports had their busiest day since Dec. 26, 2019, with 2.6 million people passing through TSA checkpoints nationwide.
There were 178 flight cancellations and issues with weather-related delays, but that amounted to less than 1% of scheduled flights, and CNN reported that of the 6,600 delays, the average wait time was less than an hour.
All told, the Transportation Security Administration reported that 10.6 million passengers were screened between the Wednesday before Thanksgiving and Sunday. That’s still less than the 11.7 million passengers who passed through security during the same holiday weekend in 2019.
But it marks a remarkable recovery from Thanksgiving 2020, when the TSA screened just 4.6 million passengers — and then the rise in ticket prices, which NBC reported were “the highest in five years,” factoring in, Thanksgiving 2022 is starting to look like a solid recovery.