When Cindy Nichol, director of the Sacramento County Airport System, stepped into her job in October 2018, Sacramento International Airport was in rapid ascent. Following six years of steady growth, the airport again saw ridership surge. In 2019, passenger traffic rose by more than 1 million over the previous year, representing a 9.3 percent increase. After the first two months of 2020, the airport was on track to again clock a 1-million-passenger jump. Instead, the COVID-19 pandemic grounded much of the airline industry last spring. In April 2020, the number of passengers plummeted almost 94 percent compared to April 2019. That severely threatened Nichol’s department because passenger volume and