Coronavirus has set aviation back to 1999, leading data analysts say

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/>