Originally Posted by
drewp123
Admittedly 8k seems a large number, but if they sold that many tickets, then there’s that many seats (which could have been sold to anyone). So it’s unclear how this would lead to delays, ESPECIALLY given they arrived so early.
I suppose it may be different from a normal day if many of those sold seats would have been connecting passengers who were “pre-cleared”, so to speak.
CLT handled 46.4 million passengers in 2018 (per wikipedia). This averages out to around 127k passengers/day (admittedly not all of these are originating); but 8k at any one time shouldn't be terribly unexpected (arriving over the span of 5-6 hours it sounds like). However a large number of these were group bookings, requiring special assistance to check in, which takes quite a bit longer. The most I've seen is 3-4 agents available to handle groups at any one time, so when you have somewhere around 200-400 groups arriving, while only being ready to handle 3-4 groups at a time, the airline is going to struggle to keep up.