Appleton flying high; other Wisconsin airports still overcoming turbulence 

By the numbers

While Milwaukee Mitchell International Airport has yet to return to its pre-pandemic level of passengers flying out, Appleton International Airport has seen its annual passenger count take off, figures from the U.S. Bureau of Transportation Statistics show.

Milwaukee’s outbound passenger traffic peaked in 2010 at 4.7 million passengers leaving on flights originating from Mitchell after Southwest Airlines began service there in November 2009. An airport executive later told a newspaper that when it opened, the airline attracted travelers from as far as Madison, Appleton and Green Bay.

As of 2024, Southwest was still Mitchell’s leading airline by share of passengers, carrying about 38 percent of the airport’s passengers in 2024, according to the BTS.

But traffic out of Milwaukee subsided, and by 2019, the last year before the COVID-19 pandemic decimated the airline industry, the number of passengers flying out of Milwaukee was down to 3.4 million.

Travel restrictions, government lockdowns, and a shift toward virtual meetings beginning in early 2020 combined to drastically reduce air travel. Mitchell saw a 62 percent drop in traffic. Dane County Regional Airport in Madison saw traffic fall by 63 percent.

By 2024, Milwaukee had yet to reach its pre-COVID level of passengers. BTS data show that 3.07 million passengers departed from Mitchell last year, nearly 30,000 fewer than in 2019. Madison had also not yet caught up, with 6,243 fewer departing passengers than in 2019.

For smaller regional airports in the state, the story was much the same: Central Wisconsin airport between Wausau and Stevens Point, as well as airports in Green Bay, La Crosse, Rhinelander and Eau Claire were all still below their pre-pandemic levels.

The exception is Appleton. Though it lost half of its traffic between 2019 and 2020, by the very next year it had recovered 351,611 of its 385,698 pre-pandemic departing passengers. And it hasn’t stopped there: Appleton has logged double digit growth each year since the pandemic and reached almost 540,000 departing passengers in 2024.

Milwaukee’s sluggishness in regaining traffic is on par with other major Midwestern airports. Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport and international airports in Detroit and Minneapolis-St. Paul are below their 2019 levels. The other Chicago airport, Midway, is the outlier. Its departing passenger count in 2024 was 284,000 greater than its pre-pandemic level.

The underlying numbers