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Analysis: Travel Is Down Almost 90% At LAX
The entrance to LAX on Thursday. (Valerie Macon / AFP)
Our friends in the APM Research Lab took a look at data published by the Transportation Security Administration to visualize exactly how precipitous the drop in air travel has been.
Since the beginning of March, the number of travelers screened at U.S. airports has plummeted by more than 96%.
Our own major hub, Los Angeles International Airport (LAX), is typically the second busiest in the nation (after Atlanta Hartsfield-Jackson), and the fourth busiest in the world.
The drop at LAX — which served nearly 90 million passengers last year — has been steep.
We asked Gabriel Cortes (our former intern), who did the analysis, for his key takeaways:
The drop in passenger volume at LAX is dramatic, and it reflects the grounding of most commercial air travel. However, even though outgoing passenger traffic is down almost 90% from a year ago, LAX is faring better than other U.S. airports. More than 1.5 million passengers were screened by LAX TSA for departing flights between March 1 and March 28.
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