HARRISBURG, Pa. — As thousands of people across the state gear up to travel for the holidays, airports are getting ready for the winter storm and increased traffic.
Harrisburg International Airport (HIA) started boarding flights at 6 a.m. and is expecting 30% of its traffic to depart before 8 a.m.
Scott Miller, spokesperson for HIA, said that the airport is responsible for clearing the runway and the airport property roads when there is a storm. Although the travel hub will execute a plan to make sure it’s safe to fly, the decision ultimately comes down to the airlines.
“It’s up to the airlines to determine which flights they fly, which ones they delay, which ones they cancel,” said Miller. “We get a perfectly pristine runway, but if they decide they don’t like the weather conditions and they cancel a flight, there’s nothing we can do about that.”
In some cases, although the HIA isn’t experiencing severe weather, airports where flights are landing could cancel or delay your departure.
According to the Associated Press, FlightAware was also expecting at least 364 flights to be canceled Thursday at O'Hare and Midway airports in Chicago. Earlier this week, those two airports said they had 350 pieces of snow removal equipment and 400,000 gallons of pavement de-icing fluid on hand for the storm.
HIA has heavy regulations on when a plane can take off in weather events. Miller said pilots and crews are not likely to put themselves or passengers in dangerous situations.
The chart above shows the rolling seven-day average of departing passengers from 2021 compared to 2022. Late spring to the end of the summer, excluding the major holidays, are the busiest time of year. Miller said this year travel is up 23% compared to last year.
For the two weeks of the Christmas season, Miller said HIA is expecting to see at least 2,800 board flights to their destination. The flights this week are considered to be leisure travel, not business travel.
“Airfares are much higher this year than they have been, so it’s something in which people who are going are paying more to do so just because there are fewer flights and a lot of demand. So it will be fairly busy, we’ll probably sell 84% to 85% of seats available for sale,” said Miller.
With inflation increasing the cost of oil and labor—and crews retiring during the COVID-19 pandemic—Miller said many of the smaller airplanes have been grounded and the larger planes are in use.
This means there are not as many flights as there were in 2019, but there are bigger airplanes, which would put HIA at 85% of seats sold in the next two weeks and traffic at pre-pandemic levels.