Just your yearly reminder that the day before Thanskgiving is not the busiest air travel day of the year. This misconception is a mass deception perpetrated by the media. 
Airplanes fly about 85% full throughout the year. Thus, there can't be a flood of travel on any day, the maximum possible increase from the norm can only be 15%.
This story of a flood of passengers right before Xgiving implies that planes are flying empty the rest of the year, or that there is a fleet of planes on a tarmac somewhere in reserve to be pulled out only on Thanksgiving to fly passengers.
This is the adult version of believing in Santa Clause: when you actually think about the numbers, it doesn't make sense. The airline industry could not be so inefficient as to make a flood of holiday flying possible.
So you see stories like this, where they struggle to report how busy it is. They go to the airport and search for the largest crowd to point the camera at, not showing you that the rest of the airport is pretty empty.
wcnc.com/article/life/h…
wcnc.com/article/life/h…
They report about the "hundreds of thousands of people" passing through the airport for Thanksgiving, but they don't put any context around them, namely that hundreds of thousands of people pass through the airport every day.
