Airlines have canceled more than 2,000 flights on Christmas Eve, says FlightAware

Airlines around the world had canceled more than 2,000 flights by the end of this Friday morning (24th), Christmas Eve, said the website FlightAware, in an indication of how the Covid-19 pandemic is affecting end-of-the-week travel. year.

The website showed that as of 10:20 am (GMT), 2,028 flights around the world had been cancelled.

The rapid increase in infections caused by omicrons has led passengers and airlines to reconsider travel. Last Thursday (23), Lufthansa announced that it will cancel thousands of flights due to the spread of the new variant of the coronavirus.

“We saw a significant drop in bookings between mid-January and February”, so “we must cancel 33,000 flights, that is, around 10% of the flights scheduled for this winter [boreal]”, informed Carsten Spohr, executive director of Lufthansa in an interview with the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung newspaper.

The German airline also announced that it would cancel intercontinental flights due to the illness of many pilots.

“Transatlantic connections to North America bound for Boston, Houston and Washington are affected, mainly from December 23 to 26, due to the increase in the number of patients” among the pilots, he said.

However, the link to the omicron variant is speculative, as Lufthansa said it is not aware of the type of illness the pilots contracted.

Last Wednesday (22), the Scandinavian SAS reported that a larger-than-usual number of sick employees due to Covid-19 and the associated health recommendations contributed to the company’s recent wave of flight cancellations.

Noting a slowdown in bookings, Ryanair — Europe’s largest airline in terms of number of passengers — warned on Wednesday (22) night that its annual losses would likely be double the forecast, due to the new variant.

The ICA Europe (Association of European Airports), citing preliminary data, calculated that passenger traffic has decreased 20% at the facilities since November 24, when the WHO (World Health Organization) announced it had identified the omicron. At the same time, the aircraft load factor dropped from 66% to 54%.