By Todd Grady
Democrat and Chronicle

(Tuesday, January 29, 2002) -- Fewer people used the Greater Rochester International Airport last year than in at least 16 years. Officials blame the drop in traffic on the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks and a decrease in business travel because of the recession.

About 2.3 million passengers used the airport last year.

That compares with 2.46 million in 2000. The last big drop in traffic came during the recession in the early 1990s.

Airport officials had projected traffic of 2.6 million to 2.7 million passengers for last year, which would have been close to the historically high numbers of the 1980s.

Terry Slaybaugh, director of the Rochester airport, said that the decline could have been worse had it not been for the area's businesses.

"We have a much more resilient business community that has to travel, and they don't stop traveling when the economy slows down or we have catastrophic events like Sept. 11," Slaybaugh said. "I think that helped us recover."

More than two-thirds of the passengers who use the Rochester airport are business travelers.

Passenger traffic at the Rochester airport fell to its lowest monthly total in at least 16 years in September. People boarding flights totaled 57,183, less than half the 118,380 travelers in August.

People flying from the airport increased over the final three months of the year with 75,240 passengers boarding flights in October, 82,446 in November and 85,638 in December.

Rochester airport officials expect that monthly traffic will continue to grow, but they are not predicting a large increase in passenger traffic this year.

They're hoping a growing flight schedule and the addition of AirTran Airways will increase traffic above the projection of 2.3 million to 2.4 million passengers.

AirTran begins service on March 14.

JetBlue Airways also is scheduled to return to a full schedule of five round-trip flights beginning Feb. 1.

The airline flew the second-highest number of passengers from the Rochester airport in 2001, behind US Airways.

Rochester lost 26 percent of its flights after Sept. 11, but airlines such as US Airways and JetBlue have been slowly adding back some of the flights they dropped.