European air traffic unlikely to reach pre-crisis levels until 2025: Eurocontrol

Air traffic management body Eurocontrol projects flight activity in the region will not return to pre-crisis levels until 2024 at the earliest and most likely not until 2025. The outlook, made in a fresh forecast issued today, is based on travel restraints within Europe being eased from this summer. If that gets delayed until the first quarter of next year, Eurocontrol does not see air traffic in Europe returning to pre-crisis levels until 2025. Eurocontrol director general Eamonn Brennan says: ”We’re heading into summer 2021 and most restrictions are still in place despite encouraging progress on the vaccination front. So while we are anticipating an uptick in summer traffic, our most-likely medium-term scenario envisages a co-ordinated lifting of restrictions by Q1 2022 between regions, which facilitates more long-haul travel. ”We’ll probably have around 50% of 2019 traffic for all of 2021”, which would be about 5.5m flights, he adds. ”By the end of next year, traffic will only have recovered to 72% of 2019 levels, and will only get back to close to where we were pre-pandemic by 2025.”<br/>