Holiday passengers set a U.S. air travel record

Travelers heading home after the Thanksgiving holiday set a record on Sunday as airport officers screened more than 3 million people.

The Transportation Security Administration said Monday that it handled 3.09 million travelers, breaking the previous record by about 74,000. That mark was set on July 7, also a Sunday after a holiday.

Hundreds of thousands of travelers were delayed or had their flights canceled. Airlines canceled about 120 U.S. flights—not an unusually high number—and more than 6,800 flights were delayed, according to FlightAware. The largest numbers of delays were at Hartsfield–Jackson Atlanta International Airport and Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport.

The TSA had predicted that Thanksgiving week air travel would rise 6% over the same days last year, fitting a pattern of record travel in 2024.