More than 3 Million Travelers Screened at US Airports in a Single Day. That’s a Record

AP

11:26 JST, December 3, 2024

Travelers heading home after the Thanksgiving holiday set a record on Sunday, as airport officers screened more than 3 million people.

The Transportation Security Administration said Monday that it handled 3.09 million travelers on Sunday, breaking the previous record by about 74,000. That mark was set on July 7, also a Sunday after a holiday.

Hundreds of thousands of travelers were delayed or had their flights canceled. Airlines canceled about 120 U.S. flights — not an unusually high number — and more than 6,800 flights were delayed, according to FlightAware. The largest numbers of delays were at Hartsfield–Jackson Atlanta International Airport and Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport.

Monday was also expected to be a busy day. By midday, there were about 80 canceled flights and more than 2,000 delays.

Amtrak rail service between Philadelphia and New York was temporarily stopped Monday because of damage to overhead electrical wires.

And some travelers trying to return home faced delays on the roads.

Traffic at Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport came to a standstill Sunday evening, with the airport using social media to tell motorists to avoid one of the two main entrance roads. Some people posted on X that they missed their flights because of the gridlock.

A DFW Airport spokesperson attributed the gridlock to “the high volume of holiday traffic in a compressed time frame.” She said the airport deployed extra police officers to help get traffic moving.

The TSA had predicted that Thanksgiving week air travel would rise 6% over the same days last year, fitting a pattern of record travel in 2024.