This story was originally produced by the Concord Monitor. NHPR is republishing it in partnership with the Granite State News Collaborative.
Manchester-Boston Regional Airport was the only airport in New England to see passenger traffic decline last year, despite the arrival of new airlines and routes.
While the decline was small — less than 1 percent — the numbers are a disappointment to boosters of what was once the fastest-growing airport in the country. This reflects the facility’s continued struggle to adapt to changes in the airline industry, which has consolidated around larger airports, and to meet competition from Logan Airport in Boston.
According to the Airports Council International, Manchester-Boston Regional Airport had 1.27 million passengers in 2024, a decrease of 0.7% from the year before, which, in turn, saw a 1 percent decline from the year before that.
By contrast, passenger numbers at the airport in Burlington, Vermont, were up 3% last year compared to 2023. In Portland, Maine, they were up 9%, and at Logan Airport, they rose almost 7%. Year-to-year traffic also rose at the commercial airports in Hartford and New Haven, Connecticut, and Warwick, Rhode Island, and even at tiny Bangor International Airport. Data was not available for Portsmouth Airport at Pease.
Things have been looking up at Manchester-Boston in the past four years with the arrival of several budget airlines: Avelo, Sun Country, Breeze and, most importantly, JetBlue, which the airport has been trying to lure for many years. Another budget airline, Spirit, came and went.
However, all these airlines offer limited or seasonal routes, sometimes flying to just one location, and have apparently not contributed much to total passenger numbers. The daily flight schedule at Manchester is still dominated by Southwest, which has about half the total traffic, and by American Airlines.
Manchester’s airport boomed in the late 1990s and early 2000s, with traffic peaking at 4.3 million in 2005. Traffic began to fall after that as airlines consolidated to a hub-and-spoke model and took a huge hit in 2020 with the COVID-19 shutdown. It has doubled since then but remains at about 1/3 the level of the 2005 peak. About half of the airport’s gates are not used regularly.
The bright spot is cargo traffic, which rose steady due to the construction of many logistics centers around the airport, although even that has stagnated in the past two years.
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