A passenger checks the flight information on a board in the departure lounge at Madrid Barajas Airport.
Paul Hanna | Bloomberg | Getty Images
SINGAPORE – More than two decades of aviation passenger traffic growth was obliterated in 2020, a new report finds.
“The pandemic and its consequences ended 21 years of global passenger traffic growth in just a few months, bringing traffic this year back to levels last seen in 1999,” said Cirium, a company for travel data and analysis.
“Compared to last year, passenger traffic is estimated to have fallen by 67% by 2020,” the company said in a press release.
In 2020, only 2.9 trillion global passenger kilometers (RPKs) were registered, compared to 8.7 trillion in 2019. RPKs are used as a measure of air traffic.
The aviation industry was hit hard by the coronavirus pandemic as countries closed their borders in an attempt to stop the spread of the disease.
According to Cirium data, airlines operated 16.8 million flights from January 1 to December 20, 2020, down from 33.2 million in the same period in 2019.
More than 40 airlines have shut down or suspended operations entirely, and experts expect more to fail in 2021, Cirium said.
Way to recovery
Asia Pacific and North America were “the fastest to settle 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 world’s busiest airports, which was dominated by airports in the US and China.
David White, vice president of strategy at Cirium, acknowledged that major cities such as New York, Beijing and Shanghai were not on the list and told CNBC that airports such as John F. Kennedy in New York were “ disproportionately affected by their international traffic in normal times. “
Airports such as Minneapolis, O’Hare (Chicago), [Dallas-Fort Worth]“Atlanta and Charlotte now have significantly more traffic than JFK because of the volume of domestic flights at those domestic hub airports,” he said. A similar pattern was reportedly observed at some Chinese airports.
International flights are down 68% from 2019, while domestic flights are down 40%.
Cirium expects passenger demand for air travel to pick up again in 2024 or 2025, with domestic and leisure traffic being the first segments to show a “sustained recovery”.