Airlines and airports in Europe handled nearly 2 billion passengers last year, up from 2.42 billion in 2019
THE European air traffic recovered last year to 83% of the level it had in 2019, before the health crisis, recording a “strong” recovery driven by low-cost carriers and southern European destinations, Eurocontrol announced today.
The European Aviation Safety Agency instead pushed back a year later, to 2025, its estimate of a return to pre-Covid-era figures, citing, in a presentation on its website, the weakness of the economic recovery, inflation and risk to continue the war that Russia is waging in Ukraine.
Airlines and airports in Europe handled nearly 2 billion passengers last year, up from 2.42 billion in 2019, with “strong disparities” depending on country and carrier. These data include every departure and every arrival on European territory.
Therefore, Germany recovered only 75% of air traffic in 2022 which he had before the crisis, France 86%the Spain 91% and the Portugal 96%. Traffic in Greece, on the contrary, amounted to 101% of the volume recorded three years earlier, and 137% in Albania.
In terms of companies, the low-cost ones came out strengthened by the crisis, recovering 85% of the traffic they had in 2019, against 75% for the classic air carriers.
Ryanair strengthened its first place in Europe by operating in 2022 109% of the flights it did three years earlier, like Volotea. Air France flights represented 80% of the 2019 level, Lufthansa flights 72%, slightly better than British Airways (71%), according to Eurocontrol.
“In 2022, European aviation weathered the storm,” the organization summarized.
After the Omicron variant at the beginning of the year and then the invasion of Ukraine “the traffic nevertheless recovered to 86% (of the 2019 level) in May and remained until the end of the year in a narrow range of 86% to 88%, he underlines .
Eurocontrol expects the number of annual flights in its area of ​​responsibility to rise this year to 92% of 2019’s figure, but predicts a “difficult” year as it bids to reduce delays – a scourge that has affected many travelers especially in the early of the summer of 2022.
As a result of labor shortages at airports in particular, the number of flights that arrived and departed on time amounted respectively to 72% and 66% of the total, i.e. 6 or 7 percentage points less than in 2019.
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