Bucking a national trend of declines in air travel, the Southland's regional airports are experiencing a surge in passenger traffic, in some cases surpassing levels of before the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.
Burbank Airport is handling 9.2% more travelers than a year ago, John Wayne Airport in Santa Ana 9.3% and Ontario International Airport 6.3%, according to the airports' July data.
"Our passengers have gotten back their confidence in traveling by air," said Victor J. Gill, spokesman for the Burbank-Glendale-Pasadena Airport Authority. "It's part of the pattern of getting back into the realm of normalcy."
The region's smaller airports stand in contrast to others across the country, where the industry is still in a slump and passenger boardings dipped 1% compared with July last year, according to the Air Transport Assn., a trade group for major commercial carriers. Overall, passenger traffic on commercial airlines nationwide has plummeted 11.2% since July 2001.
The airline industry "has gone through an extremely turbulent time, an extremely painful time," said Leonard Ginn, senior vice president of economic affairs for Airports Council International-North America, a trade group based in Washington, D.C.
The silver lining, he added, is that the monthly drop-off in passengers is now smaller than before, which could indicate an industrywide recovery around the corner.
In the meantime, such hubs as Los Angeles International Airport are still reeling from the aftershocks of an economic downturn as well as public fears stoked by 9/11, the SARS outbreak and the war in Iraq.
At LAX, 4% fewer passengers are passing through than a year ago, according to its June report, the most recent statistics available. Since June 2001, when LAX served 6 million fliers, passenger volume has nosedived 19%. This June, about 4.9 million passengers flew into or out of LAX.
Because many international carriers route flights through LAX and provide connections to other domestic destinations, the recent blows to international travel have also damaged the airport's domestic market, said Paul Haney, spokesman for Los Angeles World Airports. International travel accounts for about a quarter of total passenger traffic at LAX.
Officials at the region's other airports, which offer little or no international travel, say their operations were relatively unscathed by the SARS scare or overseas conflicts.
