Delta Air Lines plans to finally return its Atlanta hub to pre-pandemic flight capacity in 2025, five years after COVID-19 forced airlines to slash flights as travel plummeted.
Friday’s announcement is a milestone not only for Delta but its hometown of Atlanta. The airline industry has been buffeted by the coronavirus pandemic, which first forced carriers to cut flights, park planes, reduce staff and accept government rescue funding. Then came an uneven and at times bumpy recovery — marred by supply chain issues, continued challenges with the virus, but also massive pent up demand.
Delta is increasing its domestic and international flight schedules for the busy summer season of 2025, including adding flights from Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport to Naples, Italy, and Brussels, as well as more flights to airports across Georgia. That will amount to its largest-ever flight schedule from Atlanta, the carrier said.
At Hartsfield-Jackson, Delta operates the world’s largest airline hub. The hub not only serves the travel needs of Atlantans and those who come here for business or leisure, but it’s a huge domestic and global connection point for passengers within the United States and traveling between the U.S. and Europe, Latin America and other regions.
As of next summer, Delta says it will fly 968 daily flights from Atlanta to 215 cities, amounting to nearly 1.1 million seats on planes taking off each week. That’s a year-over-year increase of nearly 75 daily departures.
The airline’s recovery from the effects of the pandemic has taken years, after facing challenges earlier on including short-staffing and outbreaks of COVID-19 cases in 2022 that drove Delta to cut flights that summer, followed by aircraft supply chain constraints last year.
Competition in other cities
It has taken longer for Delta to restore its Atlanta service than to add more flights at its other hubs — in part because the company was focused on gaining market share at other hubs that have more competition.
“We did put more restoration back into like places like Los Angeles and Boston,” Joe Esposito, Delta’s senior vice president of network planning, said in an interview. “There was an opportunity for Delta to take the leadership role in those two really big aviation cities,” becoming the largest carrier in Boston and Los Angeles, he said. “It was opportunistic for us to do that.”
Meanwhile in Atlanta, Delta and its partners already control about 80% of the flight capacity and occupy most of the gates.
Before the pandemic, rivals such as Frontier and Spirit, sought to beef up their presences in Atlanta. But No. 2 carrier Southwest recently announced plans to cut about a third of its flights from Hartsfield-Jackson planned for next year, and other airlines including Spirit also face financial challenges.
That all means Atlantans are a captive market for Delta — and reliant on Delta to add flights back for more service.
Last year, Hartsfield-Jackson handled 104.7 million passengers ― maintaining its position as the world’s busiest airport but still falling short of the record 110.5 million passengers it handled in 2019. Traffic for the first eight months of this year is up more than 4% from last year — with the traffic taking a hit from Delta’s mass cancellations in July after the CrowdStrike outage before recovering.
Looking to next year, it’s yet to be seen how Southwest’s cuts will affect overall traffic at Hartsfield-Jackson. With Southwest expected to stop using as many as seven of its 18 gates, there are not yet plans for which carriers those gates would go to. Esposito, while noting Delta has no official plans on new gates in Atlanta, said “we’d always be looking for facilities in Atlanta.”
“We’re not just growing next year, but we will continue to grow Atlanta every year for the future,” he said. “It’s an efficient hub.”
Shift to larger planes
In Atlanta, Delta had operated roughly 1,000 daily flights from Hartsfield-Jackson in the years before the pandemic.
As of this summer, Delta had only restored its flight capacity to about 96% of 2019 levels. Next year, while the number of departures it operates will still fall about 100 short of 2019 levels, it will have 105% of the flight capacity it had in 2019 because of the carrier’s shift to larger aircraft that can hold more passengers.
That’s because of a continued shift away from regional jets. By next summer, 87% of Delta’s flights from Atlanta will be on its mainline aircraft rather than smaller Delta Connection regional jets. Delta retired 125 of its 50-seat regional jets during the pandemic.
“We’re putting more and more mainline into Atlanta intentionally, just because of the sheer demand of Atlanta and we want to put more and more premium seats into the Atlanta market,” Esposito said.
Another factor driving the faster growth of flight capacity is that the airline will have a larger international footprint next year than it did in 2019 from Atlanta, he said.
Business travel takes off
Delta’s restoration of service also plays a role in the broader economy.
Atlanta Mayor Andre Dickens in a written statement said Delta “plays an integral role in our economy through workforce opportunities, community investments and meaningful partnerships.”
One example of business driving more departures is Delta adding flights to Seoul, South Korea, Esposito said. Between Delta and its joint venture partner Korean Air, Delta now has three daily flights from Atlanta to Seoul’s Incheon Airport, he said.
With “the investment in the Southeast by Korean companies, especially the auto industry, there’s a really big tie now,” Esposito said. That includes Hyundai Motor Group, which is building a $7.6 billion electric vehicle factory near Savannah, Qcells with a $2.5 billion expansion in its Georgia solar panel production footprint and a $5 billion electric vehicle battery plant in Bartow County as a partnership between Hyundai and SK On.
But among the flights not being added back in Atlanta is a route to Shanghai, Esposito acknowledged. Demand for travel between the U.S. and China is “still down significantly from pre-pandemic levels,” he said. “Almost every international destination is back … if not stronger than 2019, except China, and we’ve seen business much slower to return to that market.”
An added challenge is that U.S. airlines now can’t fly over Russian airspace, meaning it would take much longer to get to Shanghai than it did in 2019, which makes it “almost unfeasible,” Esposito said. That also makes it more difficult to fly to India, he said.
New Sky Club under construction
Hartsfield-Jackson already strains during busy periods with long lines for security screening and parking shortages.
Esposito said Delta is investing to improve the experience for its premium customers, including preparing to open a new 26,000-square-foot Sky Club on Concourse D in April, which has been under construction as the airport also works on a long-term project to widen the entire concourse.
“There’s a considerable amount of money that between us and the airport and the city of Atlanta invested,” Esposito said. “We’re kind of on a continuous improvement with the Atlanta airport.”
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