100 Millionth NYC Passenger of 2006 Celebrated at JFK

[moose135]

From Newsday.com:

NEW YORK -- A Taiwanese woman who arrived at John F. Kennedy International Airport on Wednesday [Dec. 20] was named the 100 millionth passenger of the year at the region's three major airports.

The Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, which runs the airports and other transit hubs in the region, said Liang Chen was the lucky 100 millionth traveler for Kennedy, LaGuardia and Newark airports after taking a nonstop Cathay Pacific flight from Hong Kong.

In honor of the dizzying distinction, she was lavished with flowers and gifts including airline tickets, gift certificates, a Tiffany crystal apple, passes to city museums, cookbooks, tickets to Broadway shows, hotel accommodations and tickets to a New York Mets game.

The three major airports logged just under 100 million travelers last year. And they're on track to handle 104 million by the end of 2006, an increase of more than 28 percent in just four years.

The new statistic caps a series of recent records for the three airports. Last year's traffic set one, as did the more than 50.6 million passengers who trooped through in the first half of this year. Newark's passenger count hit a new high of 34.2 million this weekend, surpassing a record set in 2000.

The passenger records are a measure of a rebound in air traffic since the airborne terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, which spurred a sharp downturn in air travel and led to airline bankruptcies.

[emshighway]

Poor woman probably had no idea what was going on.

She will expect the same on her next trip.

[Tom_Turner]

Poor woman probably had no idea what was going on.

Hey, as long as she doesn't put a baby through an Xray machine..

T

[Mateo]

Ha! The Taiwanese woman gets tickets to a baseball game featuring the New York team that doesn't have the Taiwanese pitcher.

[Nonstop2AUH]

100 million pax is an awful lot of people. NYCAviation has kind of an official ring to it, maybe in 2007 we should set up a desk at each terminal to collect a 'departure tax' of, say, $10 a head. I'm sure a fair number of tourists would pay without question (having already spent $300 a night for a hotel). Happy new year suckers!

EMS: I always wondered what happens when they 'ambush' one of these people with their prizes and they are just in a hurry to get out of the airport or for some other reason don't want the attention (e.g. they told their spouse or employer they were going someplace else).

Mateo: Good point but at least it's the team that is closer to Flushing so she'll feel more at home than in the Bronx.