general

Coronavirus has set aviation back to the year 1999, a leading data analysis firm has said. In its end-of-year Airline Insights Review, Cirium calculates that the collapse in air travel precipitated by the pandemic has set back aviation by 21 years in terms of the number of flights. Between January and the start of December 2020, 16.8m passenger flights departed worldwide, compared with around 36m in the same time frame in 2019 – a collapse of 54%. The number of passengers carried fell even more steeply, with two-thirds fewer than last year. The worst day in the entire coronavirus crisis was 25 April, with only 13,600 departures worldwide – one-seventh of the 95,000 flights that operated on the busiest day, 3 January. Of the flights that did go ahead, a large majority were domestic departures – reflecting the tangle of international restrictions that have suppressed travel options. The top seven routes worldwide in 2020 were domestic flights in east Asia. Seoul to Jeju Island in South Korea had 72,000 departures – more than twice as many as the next in the list, Hanoi to Ho Chi Minh City in Vietnam, with 31,000. Third and fourth places were routes from Tokyo’s Haneda airport to Fukuoka and Sapporo respectively, followed by Shanghai to Shenzhen (adjacent to Hong Kong), Seoul to Busan and Guangzhou to Shanghai. Eighth place was the link between Saudi Arabia’s two biggest cities, Jeddah and the capital, Riyadh. In Europe, Heathrow lost its long-held crown as busiest airport to Amsterdam – with Paris CDG, Frankfurt and Istanbul almost neck-and-neck. Cirium’s CE Jeremy Bowen said: “The airlines were largely on time in 2020. The factors that cause delays — congested airspace, taxiways or even a captain patiently waiting for connecting passengers — simply did not exist in 2020."<br/>

The Singapore government will commit another $84m to the aviation sector to support its companies and workers as they weather the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic. The Civil Aviation Authority of Singapore (CAAS) said Tuesday that this additional sum is on top of the previous government support for the sector, including the Aviation Sector Assistance Package and the Enhanced Aviation Support Package. “The aviation sector remains hardest hit by the COVID-19 pandemic. The number of passenger traffic movements at Changi Airport in November 2020 is down 98% year-on-year,” CAAS said. “Given ongoing border restrictions and the resurgence of COVID-19 in many countries over winter, air travel will not recover soon. It is therefore critical that we maintain our support for the sector to help aviation companies and workers tide through the crisis.” CAAS said that Singapore’s aviation companies had implemented measures to enable air travel while minimising public health risk. Such measures require additional infrastructure, equipment and manpower, all of which have added significant cost which cannot be recovered from passengers during this period, said the authority. To help mitigate some of these costs, the Singapore government will provide funding to support the development, adoption and deployment of innovative technologies and measures to protect airport workers and air crew from contracting COVID-19. These include aircraft and baggage sanitisation systems. CAAS will continue to waive the fees payable by Singapore-based airlines for their Certificates of Airworthiness, as well as their licence fees payable for providing scheduled air services. The waiver will apply to fees payable between 1 April 2020 and 31 March 2021. <br/>

Airbus has handed over close to 550 aircraft in 2020, with three days left to pad its total in a year derailed by the Covid-19 pandemic. The European planemaker is nearing the milestone after tallying 477 deliveries through November, sources said. The figures are unaudited and will be finalized after the end of the year. Airbus remains comfortably ahead of Boeing, though neither is anywhere near where it expected to be when the year started. The Toulouse, France-based planemaker delivered a record 863 planes last year, before the health crisis crushed the balance sheets of airline and leasing-firm customers. Manufacturers have been scrambling since then to preserve orders and shuffle delivery schedules. In a sustained push to increase handovers in recent months, Airbus has used incentives such as an e-delivery option that allows customers to delegate some essential checks to the manufacturer that are made harder by travel restrictions. The planemaker, based in Toulouse, France, abandoned its annual forecast for 880 deliveries back in March, as the coronavirus began to wreak havoc on the plans of airlines.<br/>

Sheremetyevo International Airport in Russia’s capital Moscow has commissioned its newly renovated Runway-1, which is expected to increase the airport’s capacity to serve about 110m passengers per year. The new runway consists of two new high-speed-exit taxiways. The reconstruction of the runway, which was a part of the airport’s Long-term Development Programme, was completed at a cost of more than $114m. The project was financed directly, and investments made under the concession agreement terms will be recovered from the take-off and landing fees levied to aircraft. SIA board of director’s chairman Alexander Ponomarenko said: “We were able to do the reconstruction of Runway-1, which is an important stage in the development of the airfield complex thanks to the current concession agreement between the government, represented by Rosaviatsia, and Sheremetyevo airport. “As a result, today we have three runways, which—together with the development of terminal capacity and in the context of normalising passenger traffic volume—provide an opportunity to achieve our strategic goal: serving 110 million passengers per year.” Construction and installation work was finished within ten months, while the airport was still functioning.<br/>