  Coronavirus Has Ushered In the Airport of the Future With new tech like robot janitors, thermal cameras, and health passports at their disposal, the world's flight hubs—and air travel as we know it—will never be the same. By Courtney Linder
On a normal operating day, Pittsburgh International Airport (PIT) sees an average of 13,000 to 15,000 passengers coming through its gates. But there's no such thing as a "normal" day at PIT anymore—or any other airport in the U.S., for that matter. Because of the ongoing devastation of the COVID-19 (coronavirus) pandemic, PIT is lucky to see even 1,200 travelers in a day.
Of course, PIT pales in size to Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport (ATL), the busiest flight hub in the country. With ATL's monthly passenger traffic plummeting from 7.8 million in February 2020 to just 453,000 fliers in April—not to mention 22 confirmed COVID-19 cases for TSA employees on site as of June 14—the airport has temporarily shuttered the majority of its storefronts, prompting its general manager to say it may take anywhere from two to five years for passenger volume at ATL to return to pre-COVID-19 levels.
"We think that there's up-until-vaccine and then there's post-vaccine," PIT spokesman Bob Kerlik tells Popular Mechanics. "We think up-until-vaccine, we will see some leveling off of traffic that's above this 95 percent drop. We're already seeing a small uptick beginning. But until there's a vaccine, we aren't going to see the type of steady growth that we were seeing through early March."
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Minggu, 28 Juni 2020
Coronavirus Has Ushered In the Airport of the Future
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