Madison’s Dane County Regional Airport is approaching the record passenger numbers and departures it last saw in 2019, thanks to expanded facilities and new flight routes, according to a Wisconsin State Journal report.
A South Terminal expansion in June 2023 added three gates, increasing the total to 16 and enabling the airport to accommodate larger aircraft. The expansion led to more than 1,300 additional departures and over 126,000 more passengers in the year ending June 2024, according to Tomasz Pajor, the airport’s director of air service development.
Departures to top destinations rose by 963 during this period, with nearly 110,000 additional passengers. The largest growth was seen on routes to Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport, where passenger traffic surged by 191% after American Airlines introduced a daily flight in June 2023, later increased to two daily flights in September. These flights complemented an existing Delta Air Lines route.
In 2019, Dane County Regional’s busiest year, 1.2 million passengers departed from Madison. As of December 2024, the airport reported 971,193 passengers and 11,284 departures, compared to 1 million passengers and 13,635 departures over the same period in 2019.
