Routes Up in the air
Air traffi c around the world has crumbled in the wake of Covid-19. With an estimated 7,000 routes across Europe having been lost over the past year, Lynette Eyb speaks with ACI EUROPE director general Olivier Jankovec, Airport Operators Association CEO Karen Dee, and Andrew Charlton, an analyst at Aviation Advocacy, about the road to recovery.
I
t’s impossible to dress the numbers up: the equivalent of 1.72 billion passengers lost in 2020. Close to 7,000 routes gone – a decrease of 55%. Some €30bn in lost revenue for European airports. A wider aviation ecosystem down almost €160bn, according to EUROCONTROL.
Olivier Jankovec, director general for ACI EUROPE, provides a blunt assessment of 2020: “We went back to the traffic volumes of 1995.” Largely overnight, 25 years of growth had disappeared. Even in 2021, estimates have passenger traffic down between 56% and 64% compared with 2019. Karen Dee, CEO of the UK’s Airport Operators Association (gh), commissioned an analysis in late 2020 of the best, medium and worst-case outlooks. “What is my view of the situation at the moment? Pretty dire – we are somewhere worse than our worst-case scenario.”
The air travel industry does not expect to see a full recovery before 2024 or even 2025. Some airports will take longer to recover than others – many won’t recover at all. Risk-averse airlines are expected to favour larger, more affluent markets that are not generally served by smaller, regional airports. Until things recover, airlines have been relying on government support, but governments won’t be able to help indefinitely. Airlines are downsizing their fleets,
culling their route maps and focusing on cash-positive sectors, but that can only buy them so much time. “There’s a golden rule in aviation: less than a million passengers a year and you won’t be profitable,” says Andrew Charlton, an analyst at Aviation Advocacy. “A lot more airports will fall below that number and I think those airports are in trouble.”
The view from Europe With Heathrow, the UK’s premier airport, suffering a serious decline in passenger numbers in 2020 – 22.1 million passengers compared with 80.9 million the previous year – the numbers were bound to be bleak for other airports. ACI Europe’s 2020 Airport Industry Connectivity Report found all EU-UK routes were severely impacted, with sharp decreases in activity at leading international airports, including Madrid-Barajas (-71%), Rome-Fiumicino (-70%), Munich (-68%) and Frankfurt (-67%), based on September 2020 figures. In line with Charlton’s analysis, though, it was worse for smaller airports, which were unable to tap into the few key routes that had been sustained: Linz (-96%), Treviso (-95%), Vaasa (-91%), Quimper (-87%), Newquay (-86%), Shannon (-83%) and Burgas (-82%). To help redress these figures and rebuild a strong post-Covid-19 aviation network, ACI Europe is pushing for the European Commission and tourism organisations to allow governments to establish air connectivity restart schemes. These would incentivise airlines over the next three years to expand their route maps and, in particular, return to servicing smaller airports. However, the EU and national governments need to go much further than this in support of airports, Jankovec says. “US airports have received financial support from their government that is seven times what has been made available so far to European airports,” he notes. “And while European airlines
20 Future Airport /
www.futureairport.com
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45
