Sonoma County airport travel plunges at year-end amid virus concerns

Amid a newly imposed pandemic stay-home order, Sonoma County residents and visitors sharply curtailed air travel in and out of the county in December, marking the lowest level of traffic since the summer and closing out 2020 with the lowest annual passenger count in a decade.

Fewer than 11,000 travelers took off or landed at Charles M. Schulz-Sonoma County Airport last month, equating to a 38.5% drop in passenger counts compared to November. December’s numbers were less than a quarter of the count at the same time last year and the lowest monthly report since June, when local air travel was just beginning to recover during the pandemic. It increased each month through November.

The December drop at the regional air hub broke with an uptick in holiday travel nationally. Ending the year, Dec. 18 to Dec. 31 marked the busiest two-week period for air travel since the start of the pandemic, peaking at nearly 1.3 million passengers on Dec. 27, according to the Transportation Security Administration.

Public health officials said they were relieved to see that year-end travel was curbed in Sonoma County after a spike around Thanksgiving and subsequent surge in COVID-19 cases and hospitalizations.

“I definitely think it’s a good sign if travel dropped off that much. It may be just because we were seeing so many more cases per day after Thanksgiving,” said Dr. Sundari Mase, the county’s health officer. “That may definitely have influenced people’s decisions not to travel. I think it is a good thing and I hope that continues until our case numbers start decreasing.”

Approximately 600 people passed through the Sonoma County airport on each of its four busiest days in December, immediately before and after Christmas, according to airport data. That fell short of the highest-traffic days in November leading up to Thanksgiving, including two of the airport’s busiest days since the pandemic started in mid-March. Each of those days had more than 830 people flying in and out of town.

“To me, it shows that the majority of people are following the stay-at-home and hopefully staying closer to essential travel,” said Sonoma County Airport Manager Jon Stout. “It did have an impact on the number of travelers, which is what the goal of the shelter-in-place was — to limit movement and help contain the spread.”

The pandemic has hampered air travel nationwide and gutted the commercial airline industry, which has shed tens of thousands of jobs as it cut flights and dropped routes.

The year-end passenger tally for Sonoma County, 195,300, is only 40% of the record high of 488,179 in 2019, and the lowest total since 2010. It also is the first reported drop in local air traffic after a decade of sustained annual growth, with more air carriers adding new routes every year since 2016.

The decline in passengers led to about a 35% dip in revenues at the airport this year, Stout said, primarily due to forgone parking fees that make up its No. 1 source of funds.

No furloughs or layoffs are anticipated, he said. The airport received more than $19 million in emergency aid through the federal CARES Act in the spring, which will backfill the airport’s lost revenue for more than two years, Stout said.

An additional $24 million in federal grants will support a long-planned $31 million terminal renovation that got underway in November. Work on the 33,000-square-foot expansion is scheduled to ramp up next month and remains on track for a fall 2022 completion, Stout said.

The airport also recently completed a 4,000-square-foot, $4 million expansion of its gate-side passenger waiting area, in a permanent tentlike building. That project added a second security line, for when passenger traffic warrants, as well as the first permanent bathrooms beyond the security checkpoint.

Stout said those additions, plus the pending rollout of coronavirus inoculations to wider segments of the public, offer grounds to hope local air travel will begin its recovery this year. That return depends largely on the success of vaccines and the loosening of public health restrictions, he said.

“I’m expecting that we’ll have somewhat better, though not huge, improvements. I’m hoping to get maybe to 75% of 2019,” Stout said, which would equate to roughly 366,000 passengers. “I think there’s a huge demand for travel. People have a lot of pent-up desire to get away and are tired of looking at their house and doing staycations. And this will be a highly sought-after destination that plays in our favor as well. People want to visit Wine Country, and we have a lot to offer here, which I think will help us as the recovery rolls out.”

In the interim, American Airlines on Jan. 4 suspended for the season its nonstop flight between Sonoma County and Dallas/Fort Worth, with a plan for its return at the beginning of April, a company spokeswoman said.

At the start of January, Alaska Airlines also cut its direct routes to Portland and San Diego, but the airline plans to restore both this month. United Airlines, the airport’s other carrier, suspended all service in October, but expects to restore its nonstop routes to Denver and San Francisco toward the end of the March.

You can reach Staff Writer Kevin Fixler at 707-521-5336 or kevin.fixler@pressdemocrat.com. On Twitter @kfixler.