SLO County airport will remain open, as passenger numbers plunge amid pandemic
Air travel through San Luis Obispo County Regional Airport has dwindled to a trickle in recent days, and on Friday morning a normally bustling regional transportation hub was virtually empty.
Kevin Bumen, the county’s director of airports, said on Thursday that passenger numbers have “dramatically” declined with a “steady decrease in the last week.”
The slowdown isn’t likely to change anytime soon, as efforts to prevent the spread of coronavirus widen. On Thursday, the U.S. State Department advised Americans to avoid international travel.
Locally, aside from Contour Airlines’ planned cancellation of its Las Vegas flight at the end of the month (launched in October), no other airlines have announced any changes to flights or service, Bumen said.
“We’ve had some flights affected by weather this week and the typical types of things you can expect during the course of a year,” Bumen said. “But otherwise, airlines are continuing to fly out of SLO, though some flights are pretty light with passengers.”
Even if the airport continues to see a scarcity of travelers in coming days and weeks, which is likely given SLO County’s and California’s shelter-at-home orders limiting non-essential activities, the airport won’t shut down, Bumen said.
“The (Federal Aviation Administration) gave very clear direction that the airport needs to stay open,” Bumen said. “Our commitment is to operate the airport during this event. Our job is to keep the airport and terminal open.”
SLO Airport travel drops sharply in days
On Thursday, Bumen said the airport this week was at about 25% to 30% of its normal load due to the advisories and orders statewide in response to the coronavirus pandemic.
“We had a wave of young people, I assume to be Cal Poly students, heading out for the spring break,” Bumen said. “People have had to move around for a variety of reasons, and we don’t always know what those are, but it’s clear there has been a dramatic shift.”
On Friday, a Cal Poly housing resident adviser, Isabelle Wolff, said she was leaving to head home to Hawaii, where she’s from.
“I’m excited to see my family,” Wolff said. “I normally don’t get the chance to fly home unless it’s summer vacation. But I’m going to miss school and all the people here. ... Not all of us, but a lot of us (Cal Poly students), are leaving right now.”
Wolff said she feared air travel could be shut down to Hawaii and that’s why she wanted to get home.
“Hawaii is such a small island and it’s densely populated,” Wolff said. “I’m worried about the spread (of COVID-19) there.”
Another Cal Poly student, business major Roman DeLaurentis, said he was flying home to Seattle, one of the hot spots for coronavirus cases.
“I’m a little (worried),” DeLaurentis said. “Once I get home, I’ll be inside my house the whole time. It was a hard decision to come to Seattle. I was deciding between going to Seattle and staying here.”
DeLaurentis said the pandemic is “crazy, unprecedented.”
“I’m just going through the motions now and trying to get home,” DeLaurentis said.
Even with much lower numbers of passengers moving through the terminal, the airport has taken steps to ensure those who do travel are as safe as possible.
The airport has stepped up custodial efforts in high-touch areas to sanitize and hopefully prevent the spread of COVID-19. It’s also added extra hand-sanitizing stations.
Airport has seen six years of steady growth
The airport has steadily increased its number of new destinations in recent years, Bumen said, with the addition of flights to locations such as Las Vegas, Dallas, Denver, Seattle, San Diego and Portland. He said the past six years have shown steady growth.
“We were able to show that our market was capable of sustaining a quality of service, and support those new flights,” Bumen said. “Our numbers will eventually start to get back to normal, but we will have really solid performance data to show. ... We’ve had more destinations that we ever have had.”
Bumen said that he can’t recall anything like the current situation in terms of “the duration” of impact on the local airport. He did think back to the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, 2001, that led to stops on civilian travel for two days, as well as increased airport security checks permanently thereafter.
“The duration of this thing is what makes it different,” Bumen said. “Usually, it’s a single event that causes impact. This is ongoing. But we’ll get through this and work hard to get back to normal.”
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