The Busiest Time of the Year: See How Greater Binghamton Airport is Dealing with the Holiday Rush
This holiday season is being deemed the "Busiest Thanksgiving ever" as 80 million people are expected to be traveling this Thanksgiving. Over at Greater Binghamton Airport, it's no different than any other airport across the nation.
"This is definitely the busiest time of the year We see. It's now and then also in the June-July timeframe, right around the spring breaks when we see our busiest times," Commissioner of Aviation Mark Heefner said.
Heefner says typical commercial flights jump from 65-75% capacity to 85-100% during the holidays.
Seeing between 50-150 general aviation flights along with the airport's daily flight to Detroit, the location keeps a full TSA staff and additional workers on call. With an early snowfall this last week, crowds started to travel early.
"It's also a really good holiday travel in terms of kind of get away. So as we saw snow this past week, it was like, come on and start escaping that. So you fly somewhere warm," Heefner said.
It's not just departing flights, but also arriving flights, like traveler Stephen Pratt, coming back to the Southern Tier after a trip to the West Coast.
"Luckily they have this airport for, you know, flying out of town. It's compared to where you have to go other regional or international airports to travel," Pratt said. "So it's it's kind of good the way that they do offer this."
Pratt said he noticed a difference throughout his trip.
"As far as the holidays and wasn't quite as busy except coming towards this weekend," Pratt said. "I think that's when you start to get busy because of, you know, Thanksgiving and the holidays coming up."
This year, Greater Binghamton Airport faces an obstacle that hasn't been there in the last years... construction throughout 50% of the location.
"We have some space here that we can kind of move and move our tenants and the airline and airport operations into," Heefner said. "So we're able to be flexible and it's a lot of advanced coordination."
The construction is set to be complete by Spring 2025.