Cherry Capital Airport (TVC) has logged another record-breaking year, with a 2024 total passenger count of 787,114. That's a 12.3 percent increase over 2023, which itself was a record-breaker with 700,699 passengers.

Several months in 2024 saw all-time highs for passenger counts.  In July, the airport tallied 124,000 passengers, its busiest month ever. It wasn’t a fluke, either: In 2024, TVC also broke monthly records for June, August, and September. December alone was up 27 percent versus 2023.

As previously reported by The Ticker, the growth is even starker when you compare 2024 numbers to pre-pandemic tallies. Per airport CEO Kevin Klein, TVC is “up around 40 percent in passenger numbers” from 2018 – a statistic that makes it a one-of-a-kind success story among American airports. “There just are not any airports anywhere that can say that, except maybe Sarasota,” Klein previously said, in reference to the since-2018 growth. “When we announced our year-round Charlotte service, we ranked number one in the U.S. for percentage of seats being added to a market from July 2024 to January 2025. We added almost 3 percent, and the next closest was Charlotte at 2.2 percent. The national average is pretty close to zero or no growth.”

Klein attributed the growth not to tourism but to local travelers. According to Klein, the airport served “just shy of 90,000 local travelers” in 2000. 24 years later, that number has doubled. Therein, Klein says, lies the secret to TVC’s growth.

“It’s the local community,” he said. “The airport’s growth has come from those who have relocated here and now call northern Michigan home. The area has grown, and trips from here have grown almost threefold. And we are capturing more people flying from here versus other choices, and we know we are getting more business travelers, with more people parking and more business people focused on those early morning flights.”