Air: relapse for European traffic in January, weighed down by the Omicron variant

Air traffic in Europe relapsed in January, breaking a months-long recovery trend under pressure from the Omicron variant that caused travel restrictions, Eurocontrol said Thursday.

According to this traffic monitoring body, aircraft movements last month represented 68% of the total for the same month of 2019, before the Covid-19 pandemic which torpedoed the sector.

This represents a drop of 10 points compared to December, when the volume of flights in Eurocontrol space (including in addition to continental Europe, the United Kingdom, Turkey and Israel) had reached 78% of the same period. pre-crisis.

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Above all, the fall in January marks a reversal of the trend compared to the previous six months: from 50% in June 2021 compared to 2019, aircraft traffic had grown to 71% in August and 77% in November.

Encouraging first days of February

The first days of February nevertheless seem encouraging, with an increase in the number of flights of 7% to 17,719 in the week from 3 to 9, compared to the previous week, detailed Eurocontrol on its website.

“

”, according to the organization.

But with traffic at 68%, European air transport is anchored in the low range of Eurocontrol's air traffic recovery estimates, which initially forecast for February a volume of between 67% and 91% of the 2019 level.

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Yet the Eurocontrol figures do not give any indication of the number of passengers, which depends on an often low aircraft occupancy rate since the start of the pandemic.

Thus in 2021, the area covered by the organization saw 56% of the aircraft traffic evolve in 2019, but Europe found only 44.3% of its air passengers in the same year, according to preliminary figures from the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO), an agency of the United Nations.