Airports are more chaotic, lines are longer, and delays are more frequent — but at least you no longer have to obstruct your breathing if you don’t want.
Just a few months after you could walk to your gate barely seeing another soul, airports are overflowing. They may be the best place to witness the status of America today: massive demand for travel and leisure, paired with labor shortages, hinky supply chains, and needless regulations unevenly enforced.
Put another way, President Joe Biden and his party successfully handed billions to consumers, but failed to pass a bill to update infrastructure. The result is overcrowded infrastructure. That’s not all, though. Our airport mob scenes and the Biden administration’s unwillingness to defend its travel mask mandate both reveal how people are simply done with pandemic precautions.
March saw record crowds in airports all over America, especially down in Florida, where lockdown-wary people go to escape masks, plexiglass barriers, and social distancing markers on the floor. The airport in St. Petersburg, Florida, saw its busiest March ever. April has started off even hotter in other markets.
This surge of air travel didn’t come out of nowhere. The United States became the dominant capital of air travel over the pandemic. The seven
busiest airports in 2021
were all in the U.S., topped by Atlanta, as usual. Dallas, Denver, Charlotte, North Carolina, and Orlando, Florida, all skyrocketed up the rankings into the top tier, joining LAX and Chicago’s O’Hare.
As Europeans rotated their lockdowns and Asian countries pursued zero-COVID with the same fervor Ponce de Leon once chased the Fountain of Youth, a sizable chunk of Americans pursued normalcy once the vaccines were available and stay-at-home orders evaporated.
Throw in college spring breaks in March, family spring breaks around Easter, and a broad conclusion that we are done with the pandemic, even as a hundred discredited public health authorities cry, “The virus isn’t done with us!”
The boost is in cities big, medium, and small. Louisville, Kentucky, is on pace for a record travel year in 2022 — which would seem unimaginable if you were to judge by the wary tone of the national news media and state and federal officials. “In the last year, we’ve added two new airlines, 15 new routes,” an airport official
said
.
When a federal judge struck down Biden’s illegal mask mandate, you could hear a thousand Karens scream, but you didn’t hear the Biden administration object. They knew that in airports, of all places, Americans were ready to leave all that behind.
