Remember the prognosticators at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic who said business travel was dead?

"Thank God they weren't right," Ed Bastian, chief executive of Delta Air Lines, said Thursday before an lunchtime audience of nearly 700 in downtown Minneapolis.

"People forgot how important fellowship is and the social aspect we create when we're together."

One of the main topics at the annual State of the Airport lunch — hosted by Airport Foundation MSP for business leaders, politicians and partners of the airport — the last few years has been how close the airport is to its pre-pandemic level of passenger and flight traffic. The news this year is that it's very nearly all the way back — and may be entirely by December or early next year.

Traffic numbers from the Metropolitan Airports Commission (MAC), which runs the airport, show that about 6% fewer people got on and off planes at MSP last month than in August 2019.

For Delta, which relies more heavily on business travelers than most airlines, Zoom calls and remote work, which became fixture of pandemic life, posed a threat to its business model. Yet business travel picked back up over the last four years, vanquishing that worry for the Atlanta-based airline.

Bastian told the room Thursday that business travel is "more than 100% back" for Delta as a whole. In a brief interview afterward, he said business travel at MSP is all the way back and leisure travel "is largely back."

"But our [national] economy is larger so the real relationship still has some room to grow," Bastian added. The U.S. economy has grown about 9%, and Minnesota's about 5%, in real terms since 2019.

He and Brian Ryks, MAC executive director, also talked about the "dark, dark" days this summer when Delta's technology systems were brought to a halt after a cybersecurity provider, CrowdStrike, performed a software update in mid-July that crashed systems around the world.

The outage began on July 18, a Friday that was the beginning of the most-booked summer weekend for Delta. The airline's planes were expected to be 95% full, with 700,000 people flying on that Friday alone.

"For a lot of travelers, this was their only trip of the year. It was vacation," he said.

Bastian said it took six hours for Delta's technicians to get the airline running again, and five days for its system to be back on normal schedules. He thanked MSP employees for helping Delta get through the crisis and noted that Delta filed several lawsuits seeking damages on behalf of itself and customers.

"I don't know about you, but I'm sick and tired of these big tech companies that run our lives and don't take accountability," Bastian said, drawing applause. "Of course, people understood it wasn't Delta, but it still was Delta."

The airline had a successful summer season with its European operations. Delta added nonstop MSP flights to Dublin this summer and recently announced nonstop service between MSP and Rome starting in summer 2025.

Bastian said direct service to Scandinavia is also a possibility for its Minneapolis-St. Paul hub. He suggested it may come from code-share partner Air France, which operates at MSP and earlier this month took a sizable stake in SAS AB, the flagship carrier of the Scandinavian countries.

The one market that still looks bleak is China. Delta had just started direct flights from MSP to Shanghai a few months before the pandemic. Bastian said flight loads between China and the U.S. are only around one-third of their pre-pandemic level. The problem, he said, had nothing to do with governments in the two countries or restrictions.

"There's just not demand," Bastian said, citing diminished interest by tourists in both countries toward the other. "We talk about geopolitical matters that affect world peace and understanding. Well, you've got a real one right now. We're real worried about that. If we don't start getting closer with each other, we're going to grow further apart."

Asked later about the prospect of restarting service to China from MSP, Bastian said, "We will add flights as demand warrants, and right now the demand is very limited to China."

Both MSP and Delta won major awards this year for on-time performance. Bastian credited the airline's award, in part, to MSP's ground crews that keep the airport running in winter.

"The operational efficiency of this airport has always been a wonder," Bastian said. "As someone who lives in the South, we see the snow coming and we run and hide. You run out and play and enjoy it."

As the lunch neared an end, Bastian mentioned the sunny skies and summerlike temperature and said he doesn't often fly to Minnesota "for the weather." Then, he and other Delta executives flew back to Atlanta, arriving as Hurricane Helene headed onto the Florida Panhandle and into Georgia.