In the News

On a hot afternoon last week, Carl Beardsley gestured toward rows of vehicles glistening in the sun in a surface parking lot at the Wilkes-Barre/Scranton International Airport.

Many of those cars and trucks belong to people who were away on leisure travel said Beardsley, the airport’s executive director.

And that is a dramatic contrast with what the same lot looked like during the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic last spring.

“There were four cars out there,” Beardsley recalled of one especially bleak day in 2020. “It was unbelievable.”

Now, though, pent-up demand has the airport’s lots populated once again as travelers take to the skies as life edges back toward a sort of normal.

Memorial Day weekend passenger numbers at AVP, as the airport is also known, underscore the stark contrast: 3,508 people traveled for the holiday in 2019, but just 715 in 2020, Beardsley explained. This year, the figure was 2,206.

“They’re looking good. We’re moving in the right direction,” Beardsley said. “We’re starting to see ourselves trend towards growth.”