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A passenger checks flight data on a board in the departures corridor at Madrid Barajas airport.
Paul Hanna | Bloomberg | Getty Images
SINGAPORE — More than twenty years of growth in airline passenger traffic had been erased in 2020, a brand new report discovered.
“The pandemic and its consequences wiped out 21 years of global passenger traffic growth in a matter of months, reducing traffic this year to levels last seen in 1999,” stated Cirium, a travel knowledge and analytics firm.
“In comparison to last year, passenger traffic is estimated to be down 67% in 2020,” the firm stated in a press launch.
Only 2.9 trillion world income passenger kilometers (RPKs) had been recorded in 2020, versus 8.7 trillion in 2019. RPKs are used as a measure of airline traffic.
The aviation trade was hit arduous by the coronavirus pandemic, as international locations closed their borders in a bid to stem the unfold of the illness.
According to Cirium’s knowledge, airways operated 16.8 million flights from Jan. 1 to Dec. 20, 2020. That’s down from 33.2 million in the identical interval in 2019.
More than 40 airlines completely ceased or suspended operations, and consultants count on extra to fail in 2021, based on Cirium.
Road to restoration
Asia-Pacific and North America had been the “fastest to establish themselves on the long path to recovery,” based on Cirium’s Airline Insights Review 2020 report.
That development was mirrored in Cirium’s record of the world’s busiest airports, which was dominated by airports in the U.S. and China.
Acknowledging that main cities reminiscent of New York , Beijing and Shanghai had been lacking from the record, David White, a vp of technique at Cirium, advised CNBC it seems that airports reminiscent of New York’s John F. Kennedy have been “disproportionately impacted due to their international traffic in normal times.”
“Airports such as Minneapolis, O’Hare (Chicago), [Dallas-Fort Worth], Atlanta and Charlotte have significantly higher traffic than JFK now due to the volume of domestic flights at those domestic hub airports,” he stated. An analogous sample was reportedly noticed in some Chinese airports.
International flights fell 68% in contrast with 2019, whereas home travel was down 40%.
Cirium expects passenger demand for air travel to bounce again in 2024 or 2025, with home and leisure traffic being the primary segments to indicate “sustained recovery.”
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