Americans took to the friendly skies ahead of this Independence Day weekend — in even greater numbers than pre-pandemic.
The Transportation Security Administration screened 2.2 million people at airport checkpoints on Friday, according to TSA figures.
That was “the highest throughput since the start of the pandemic,” TSA spokesperson Lisa Farbstein said in a tweet.
That narrowly exceeds July 2, 2019 — when TSA screened 2.18 million.
(On July 2, 2020, the federal agency screened nearly 720,000 Americans.)
The TSA has published “throughput” figures since the early days of the pandemic as a way to track domestic air travel. Financial and other professionals have used the data to monitor the reopening.
The weekend was expected to set records for post-pandemic travel by airplane and automobile.
