The airports in San Jose and Oakland are losing altitude in arduous separate quests to recover from their coronavirus-spawned losses in passenger traffic, new reports show.
San Jose International Airport showed a decline in passenger trips through the Silicon Valley aviation hub during August compared with the same month the year before, according to the airport.
Oakland International Airport, in a similar comparison, suffered a decline in the number of air travelers it handled for each of the last three months when compared to the same months the year before, the air travel center reported.
During August, San Jose Airport accommodated slightly under 1.09 million passengers, which represented a decline of 0.2% from the number of passengers the South Bay travel complex handled in August 2022.
Oakland Airport in August accommodated slightly over 977,300 passengers, which was down 10.1% from the same month the year before. The East Bay airport’s June passenger totals were down 5.8% from the year before while the July totals were down 7.1% from the same month in 2022.
The weakening trend also means both the East Bay and South Bay airports are further away from the heights to which they had climbed in 2019, the final full year before the business shutdowns ordered by government officials to combat the spread of COVID-19.
In 2019, San Jose International Airport handled a record-high 15.65 million passengers. But for the 12 months that ended in August 2023, the air travel hub accommodated just 12.15 million passengers, which was 22.4% below the lofty heights of 2019.
Similarly, Oakland International Airport accommodated 13.38 million passengers in 2019. However, over the 12 months ending in August of this year, the aviation complex handled just 11.38 million passengers, which was down 15% from the 2019 total. Oakland Airport’s all-time high came in 2018, with 13.59 million passengers.
In contrast, San Francisco International Airport handled 4.97 million passengers in July, up 17.6% from the July 2022 total. The July statistics were the most recent available from that airport.
Like the airports in Oakland and San Jose, however, SFO remains far below the levels it reached in 2019 ahead of the coronavirus outbreak.
Over the 12 months that ended in July, San Francisco Airport accommodated 47.78 million passengers. That was 16.9% below the 57.49 million passengers the airport handled in 2019.
