Blue Grass Airport Executive Director Eric Frankl said 2024 will likely go down in the books as the Lexington Aviation Center’s busiest year on record. This summer has already seen Blue Grass record its largest number of travelers over the course of a month. Frankl said airlines are making seating decisions tied to traveler growth.
“Obviously if the airlines didn’t feel that people were going to be flying, they probably wouldn’t have added it, but they added a record amount of seats over the summer and this coming October as well. A lot of larger aircraft,” said Frankl.
Global tech outages in July caused Delta systems to be disrupted for six days and prompted numerous delays. Frankl said the computer issues at Blue Grass were handled relatively quickly, but there were still some lingering issues at other airports globally.
“It’s a system. You have one glitch in the system and while I feel like our airport performed as best we could, we got our system back up and running. Other airports were slower, the hubs were slower and obviously, it had a trickle-down effect and impacted a lot of customers negatively for sure,” said Frankl.
Frankl said every potential flyer takes into consideration the possibility of delay. He said families with children, those carrying something like golf clubs, or people who anticipate lots of ground travel, may opt for a trip by car. But, Frankl said Blue Grass still sees a good number of travelers to destinations like Myrtle Beach or Destin Florida.
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