Quote:
Originally Posted by austlar1
from Wikipedia:
"1973 saw Love Field, which had more than 70 gates and saw frequent Boeing 747 service, reach record emplanements at 6,668,398 as the eighth busiest airport in the United States.
[SNIP]
Seems interesting that today in Austin we are handling 3,000,000 more passengers than Love Field was handling in 1970 and doing it with about a third of the number of gates.
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Just to clarify one point, that 1973 Dallas figure is for enplanements only (departing passengers) Austin enplanements for 2013 were 5,010,665. If we assume that Love Field had roughly the same amount of arriving passengers (deplanements) back in 1973, then Love Fields total passenger count back then would have been roughly 13.2 million - about 3 million more than Austin has today.
After the November 2013 totals came out, I thought we would be close to 10 million but still fall short. I'm glad I was wrong.
January and February are typically Austin's slowest months, but I flew out of Austin Jan. 22 (a Wednesday - typically one of the slower travel days of the week.) and the airport seemed busier than usual, although there were only 43 passengers on my flight to Tampa. When I came back a week later on Jan. 29, the flight from Tampa to Houston Hobby was full, but the connecting flight to Austin only had 58 passengers. Still, the terminal itself seemed busy for 10:00 a.m. on a Wednesday.
BTW, I noticed they're really making progress on the new garage, and the work being done at Gate 3 which will enable it to handle international flights looked to be just about done.