Passenger traffic through
Milwaukee Mitchell International Airport grew 6% from April, reaching 366,894 in May.
While the total number of enplanements and deplanements was up sharply from May of 2020, when only 63,000 passengers went through the airport, Mitchell still has work to do to return to pre-pandemic traffic levels. The airport reached 62% of its 2019 level in May, up from nearly 59% in April and 50.5% in March.
Two airlines – American and Delta – accounted for a large portion of the uptick in passenger activity for May.
Delta increased its passenger total from April by nearly 21,000 to 72,434, giving the airline a 19.7% share of the market, up from almost 15%. Similarly, American’s traffic was up more than 7,700 to 55,119, a nearly 1.3 percentage point increase in share to 15%.
Southwest Airlines, the dominant carrier at Mitchell, saw a slight increase in activity with 177,148 passengers, up 831 from April. Given the large increases at other carriers, Southwest’s share was down almost 2.9 percentage points to 48.3%.
The other two major carriers at the airport – Frontier and United – saw decreases in both passenger activity and share.
Frontier was down 6,700 passengers to 25,095 and its share dropped nearly 2.4 points to 6.8%. United was down 591 passengers to 30,283. Its share was of 0.7 point to roughly 8.3%.
Across all airlines, Mitchell averaged 15,014 seats available per day, a slight decrease from the 15,243 seat per day average in April. It is also well behind the 23,167 seats per day the airport averaged in May of 2019.
