Spring Break Passengers Bring Bradley Airport Travel to Pre-Pandemic Levels

Bradley International Airport had its highest volume of travelers on April 6 since the start of the pandemic, and is attributing the numbers to spring break travel, according to New England TSA spokesman Dan Velez.

TSA officials at Bradley Airport in Windsor Locks, Connecticut screened 11,568 people on Thursday, April 6, Velez said. This is the most people who have traveled through the airport since the pandemic began, the spokesman explained.

On the same day in 2022, Velez said, TSA officials screened 10,229 people. This year’s high number of passengers in the airport is “definitely attributed” to spring breakers and spring break travel, he said.

Despite having the most travelers in the airport in years, Velez said, TSA didn’t see Bradley pop up in the organization’s hotspot tracker, which notifies TSA officials if wait times in any airport screening line are too long.

The maximum standard wait time in line was 31 minutes, the TSA official said, and the TSA PreCheck max time was at 9 minutes. 87.5% of passengers waited less than 15 minutes in line, while 3% had to wait between 15 and 29 minutes.

There were approximately 1,100 passengers in the airport who had to wait more than a half hour in line, Velez said, and he added that the airport and officials were able to handle the volume of passengers well.

One of the top three TSA passenger screening days in Bradley’s history was in another April; there were 12,528 passengers screened in the airport on April 15, 2019.

The most TSA passenger screens at Bradley ever recorded was 12,776 on Nov. 25, 2018, and the second-highest was 12,603 on Dec. 1, 2019.

Here is a list of the airport’s top 10 highest travel days so far in 2023: