Global airline capacity and traffic volumes continue to decline
This is the latest prediction from OAG (www.oagaviation.com): Nearly 5 percent fewer flights forecast in 2009 and a commensurate 3 percent drop in seat capacity.
Less crowded airports may mean less hassle on the ground; but not much hope of emptier planes, as airlines cut capacity.
The world’s airlines scheduled 4.9% fewer flights for March 2009 compared with the same month last year, with a 3.3% drop in seat capacity, according to the latest statistics from OAG (www.oagaviation.com).
This is the eighth successive month of decline, and represents a reduction of more than 122,000 flights and 9.8 million seats year on year. The total number of flights scheduled to operate worldwide in March is 2.38 million, offering 289.8 million seats to travelers around the globe. Global airline schedules for the first quarter 2009 have dropped by 6.7%, or 491,000 fewer flights. This is the first time we have seen a downturn in Q1 figures since 2002, when the industry was absorbing the double impact of 9/11 terrorist attacks on the U.S. and an economic meltdown from the burst of the dot.com bubble. Capacity for this quarter also has fallen by 4.4%, representing a reduction of 38.6 million seats. Within the United States this month, domestic airline flight activity has dropped 9.2% overall, or 76,164 fewer flights, resulting in 6.5 million fewer seats. The U.S. low cost sector is showing a year-on-year decrease for the month of just over 9% for both frequencies and capacity. David Beckerman, vice president market intelligence at OAG, says: ‘OAG figures for March reveal a continuing slowdown in the global figures and on the key long-haul routes between North America and hubs in Europe, Asia Pacific and Latin America. Asia is holding up much better with a marginal decline in frequencies and slight growth in intra-regional capacity, while the Middle East is bucking the global trend with comparatively healthy growth, especially for international operations. Europe continues to see sharp cutbacks on routes to, from and within the region, while Africa remains fairly stable compared with this time last year.’ OAG FACTS uses interactive graphs to display a visual trend of the performance of a specific airport, route, country or region from 2001 onwards, sourced from OAG’s consolidated database of global airline schedules. For a fuller review of this month’s OAG FACTS statistics, please visit http://www.oagaviation.com/aviation-reports/reports-f-and-c-trends.htm.
According to a report by EUROCONTROL in Brussels, the decline in air traffic will affect all sectors.
‘Even the low-cost market is not immune – in November 2008 it saw its first 12-month decline in 15 years and in February saw 5% fewer flights than February 2008 (even allowing for the leap year). The business aviation market is also declining – down by 21% in February 2009 compared to February 2008. The weak trans-Atlantic traffic caused by the economic and financial crisis has wiped out any benefits of the EU-US Open Skies agreement which came into effect last spring.
The economic crisis is affecting air traffic on three fronts: reduced output and incomes means fewer goods to ship and lower demand for air travel; secondly, credit difficulties have hindered restructuring and investment by aircraft operators and contributed to bankruptcies; and finally recent migration flows within Europe, which had brought an increase in air travel, now appear to be reversing.
“As passengers look for cheaper ticket options, yields are falling and load factors remain weak despite airlines cutting capacity in the winter,” said David Marsh, Head of Forecasting at EUROCONTROL. “All of these factors suggest that this decrease will not be short-lived and the recovery in traffic growth is not expected before the end of 2009 with, at best, weak growth in 2010.”