We are currently working on a project at Scioto Analysis where we are using data on the number of people traveling through airports to make some tax revenue estimates. That project is interesting for a whole host of reasons, but one especially fun part has just been poring over this airport data.
We compiled data from Ohio and North Carolina on the monthly passengers flying into every airport in the state from 2002 to 2024. Since these numbers are a little difficult to pull out and use, we thought it would be valuable to share some of the observations we had about this dataset.
The COVID-19 impact has faded
The lockdowns that happened in 2020 as a response to the COVID-19 pandemic had a major impact on all forms of travel. For most airports, this meant a drop in the total number of passengers arriving by 60% - 70% in 2020 compared to 2019.
In recent years, most airports have returned to their pre-pandemic levels of visitor traffic. For most airports, they achieved this in 2023. During 2024, we saw some of the regular growth that more closely follows the trends before the pandemic.
This will be an interesting statistic to track going forward. We can learn a lot by understanding how people move around.
Cincinnati was a major airport in the early 2000s
In 2004, Cincinnati had multiple months where over 1 million people passed through the airport there. By 2010, monthly visitors were down to under 400 thousand. The Cincinnati airport has hovered around this same number of monthly visitors since then, keeping it in line with the airports in Cleveland and Columbus.
The main reason for this change was the merger between Delta and Northwest airlines in 2008. After the merger, Delta cut flights to Cincinnati. This had such a significant impact on the airport that it closed one of its terminals in 2009.
What drives airport traffic?
In our analysis, we are specifically comparing air travel between Ohio and North Carolina. Looking at these states, you see that North Carolina has had over double the total number of air passengers landing in their airports compared to Ohio over the past couple of decades. Most of this is driven by the airport in Charlotte, which by itself nearly matches the combined monthly passengers landing in Cincinnati, Cleveland, and Columbus. The Raleigh-Durham airport also has about 50% more traffic than any of the large airports in Ohio.
So, why is it that two states that have very similar populations have such different air traffic numbers?
One thought I had was that North Carolina might have more tourists than Ohio. The intuition behind this is that tourists often travel further distances to get to where they are trying to go, and as such may be more likely to travel by plane. The issue with this is that according to the Ohio Department of Development and the North Carolina Department of Commerce, Ohio has more tourism spending than North Carolina!
This doesn’t mean that tourism is not part of the reason why North Carolina has more air traffic than Ohio, but it probably means it’s not the main explanation.
One thing that could be driving this is people flying to Charlotte to get to destinations in South Carolina. This is purely speculation on my part, but there must be some reason why there are so many more people flying to North Carolina than Ohio.