Montreal, Canada:
The UN aviation agency on Friday predicted “prolonged depressed demand” for air travel and more monetary troubles for airlines, following a year of fewer flights and major losses blamed on the pandemic.
Air travel plunged 60 % in 2020 as nations closed borders and restricted travel to slow the spread of Covid-19, the International Civil Aviation Organization stated in a report.
The close to-term outlook, it stated, “is for prolonged depressed demand, with downside risks to global air travel recovery predominating in the first quarter of 2021, and likely to be subject to further deterioration.”
With just 1.8 billion passengers taking to the air throughout the very first year of the pandemic, compared to 4.5 billion in 2019, airline losses reached US$370 billion, according to ICAO figures.
Airports and air navigation services providers lost a additional US$115 billion and US$13 billion, respectively.
And extreme liquidity strains, the ICAO stated, are now “placing the industry’s financial viability in question and threatening millions of jobs around the world.”
The scenario has also been devastating for tourism, provided that half of international holidaymakers applied air travel in the previous.
A recovery, the ICAO stated, will hinge on the thriving rollout of vaccines, which have now began to be distributed.
Several governments have also supplied or are in talks with carriers about bailouts.
The plunge in air travel started in January 2020, but was restricted to a handful of nations. As the novel coronavirus spread, air transport “came to a virtual standstill” by the finish of March, the ICAO stated.
A month later, with the introduction of wide-scale lockdowns, border closures and travel restrictions about the planet, passenger numbers dropped 92 % from 2019 levels.
Passenger visitors then saw a moderate rebound throughout the ordinarily busy summer time travel period, but once more dropped off in the final 4 months of 2020, coinciding with a second wave of Covid-19 infections triggering fresh restrictions.
The ICAO noted that domestic travel has demonstrated stronger resilience, specifically in China and Russia, exactly where passenger numbers have currently returned to the pre-pandemic levels.
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