Global airlines recovered in September 97.3% of their passenger traffic from the same month of 2019, before the health crisis, thanks to the acceleration of the recovery of international routes, the sector's main organisation announced on Thursday. While domestic flights had so far been the driving force behind the recovery of air transport, which has been very hard hit by Covid-19 since March 2020, the activity of international beams has reached "93.1% of the level of September 2019", the International Air Transport Association (Iata) pointed out.
This ridership, calculated in revenue passenger-kilometres (RPK), one of the sector's benchmark indices, grew by 31.2% in one year. In August, it was trading at just 88.5% of the same month's levels four years earlier, IATA said in a statement. The recovery remains uneven across regions, reaching 105.3% of September 2019 levels in North America and the Middle East, but 94% in Europe and 79.7% in Asia-Pacific.
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2023 was "a year of strong recovery"
On the other hand, the recovery rate compared to the pre-crisis period fell month-on-month on domestic routes, from 109.2% in August to 105% in September. The RPKs of these routes have been above pre-pandemic levels since April, boosted by the lifting of travel restrictions in China (108.1% in September). 2023 was "a year of strong recovery in demand (...) We have every reason to believe that the sector will continue its momentum beyond the New Year, despite economic and political uncertainties in some parts of the world," IATA Director General Willie Walsh was quoted as saying in the statement.
On the other hand, he regretted the "unacceptable" supply chain problems that could cause delays in deliveries of new aircraft, which he said "hampered the recovery", as well as the bottlenecks caused by air traffic control inefficiencies in some regions. According to IATA's latest projections, published in June, air transport is expected to almost return to its pre-pandemic passenger numbers in 2023, at 4.35 billion compared to 4.54 billion in 2019.
Airlines, on average globally, are expected to make their first profits since the outbreak of Covid-19 this year, at $9.8 billion. They lost some $183 billion cumulatively between 2020 and 2022.