Determinants of U.S. airport passenger traffic: The role of metropolitan economies in the post-pandemic era

Given the disruptive impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on air passenger demand in the early 2020s, this paper attempts to establish if some of the traditional links that have existed between airport passenger traffic and metropolitan economies have been fundamentally altered during the post-pandemic era. Only those metropolitan areas that included airports that the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) officially defined as air traffic hubs in 2021 were included in this analysis. Data were collected from the FAA and the U.S. Census Bureau's American Community Survey. The spatial distribution of air passengers by metropolitan area was intensely geographically concentrated where the ten largest passenger markets by metropolitan area in the United States accounted for nearly half of all passenger enplanements. A linear regression analysis was performed to examine the relationship between air passenger demand and a group of predictor variables using SPSS. In the final regression model, 41.2% of the variation in air passenger demand by metropolitan area was accounted for by four predictor variables: the percent of the workforce employed in Information, Transportation and Warehousing, Professional-Scientific-Technical Services or PST, and Finance-Insurance-Real Estate or FIRE. These results appear to confirm some of the earlier research which articulated that a regional workforce with a strong tradable services sector can positively impact air transport provision. Even during the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic, those metropolitan areas with a disproportionate share of tradable services tended to generate more resilient air passenger markets, at least in terms of the way they “bounced back” from the negative impacts of the pandemic.