East Hampton Airport Holiday Traffic Up Over 2021

East Hampton Town had hoped that Memorial Day weekend 2022 would be the first sliver of a summer season in which it was able to tamp down the din of aircraft traveling to and from East Hampton Airport.

But after a state judge blocked the town’s plans to impose new rules, the skies over the airport were unfettered by any town rules — almost — and traffic at the airport was up by 17 percent over Memorial Day weekend 2021, despite poor weather on Friday and Saturday morning.

There were 630 flights into or out of the airport from Thursday, May 26, through Memorial Day, May 30, compared to 537 over the same four-day stretch in 2021 — a year when the airport returned to its previously annual growth in overall traffic, a steep drop in the first year of the pandemic.

The busier holiday weekend this year still pales in comparison to the traditional start of the summer season in 2019, when there were more than 1,100 flights throughout the long weekend.

But that was before the pandemic reshuffled living arrangements and vacationing patterns across the region. While charter aircraft traffic dropped precipitously in 2020 because of social distancing, fewer invited houseguests, and more people staying on the East End basically full time and not commuting back and forth to the city.

But as 2020 wore on, new air travel patterns emerged, which, when overlayed with a gradual return of traditional weekend travel, pushed total flights at the airport past pre-pandemic levels in 2021.

More flights by private jets, especially on midweek days, and busier shoulder-seasons and winter seasons have become the hallmarks of a population of wealthy second-home owners increasingly based on the South Fork and commuting to other places for work demands, rather than the reverse.

The lawsuits that halted the town’s plans to close the airport briefly last month and transition it to a private facility with new flight quotas are due to be heard in a Riverhead courtroom on Thursday, June 2, while a temporary restraining order remains in place barring the town from imposing the new rules.