A passenger checks on-board flight information in the departure hall at Madrid Barajas airport.
Paul Hanna | Bloomberg | Getty Images
SINGAPORE – More than two decades of growth in passenger traffic was wiped out by 2020, a new report has found.
“The pandemic and its impact wiped out 21 years of global passenger traffic growth in just a few months, reducing traffic this year to levels last seen in 1999,” he said. Cirium, a travel data and analysis company.
“Compared to last year, passenger traffic is estimated to be down 67% in 2020,” the company said in a press release.
Only 2.9 trillion kilometers of global passenger revenue (RPKn) were recorded in 2020, compared to 8.7 trillion in 2019. RPKn are used as a measure of airline traffic.
The aviation industry was hit hard by the pandemic of coronavirus, as countries closed their borders in an effort to stop the spread of the disease.
According to Cirium data, airlines operated 16.8 million flights from January 1 to December 20, 2020. That’s down from 33.2 million in the same period in 2019.
More than 40 airlines have either completely stopped or suspended operations, and experts expect more to fail in 2021, according to Cirium.
Road to get past
Asia-Pacific and North America were “the fastest established on the long road to recovery,” according to Cirium’s Airline Insights Review 2020 report.
That trend was reflected in Cirium’s list of the busiest airports in the world, in which airports in the US and China dominated.
Realizing that cities like New York, Beijing and Shanghai were missing from the list, David White, vice president of strategy at Cirium, told CNBC that airports like John F appear to be. Kennedy in New York has been “making an unfair impact because of their international traffic at normal times. “
Airports such as Minneapolis, O’Hare (Chicago), [Dallas-Fort Worth], Atlanta and Charlotte now have significantly higher traffic than JFK because of the number of domestic flights at these domestic airports, “he said. A similar pattern was reported. seen in some Chinese airports.
International flights fell 68% compared to 2019, while domestic travel fell down 40%.
Cirium expects passenger demand for air travel to kick back in 2024 or 2025, with domestic and leisure traffic as the first sections to show a “sustainable recovery.”