The news comes as travel bookings also plummeted nearly three-fourths compared to the year before, “putting further pressure” on airline revenues and “potentially impacting the timing of the expected recovery”, a group representing 82 percent of global airline traffic said on Wednesday.
The global aviation industry was hit by the worst demand levels in aviation history, the International Air Transport Association (IATA) reported on Wednesday.
Air traffic for 2020 fell by 65.9 percent compared to 2019, with forward bookings tumbling since late December, it added.
International traveller numbers last year were 75.6 percent lower than 2019 levels, with capacity and load factor falling 68.1 percent and 19.2 percent, respectively.
Traffic in December last year peaked at 69.7 percent, down 0.7 percent from November at 70.4 percent. Domestic demand also fell 48.8 percent compared to 2019, with capacity and load factor shrinking 35.7 percent and 17 percent, respectively.
Despite the IATA forecasting a 50.4 percent improvement in 2021, there would be a “severe downside risk” if governments imposed severe travel restrictions to tackle new variants of the disease, the organisation said.
Further restrictions could limit demand to a 13 percent rise in 2020, or 38 percent of 2019 levels, the IATA added.
Despite noting the loss of 1.7m people during the COVID-19 pandemic in December, de Juniac also slammed “frustrating” national lockdowns in a December 2020 speech as being imposed with “badly coordinated and poorly communicated border closures”, citing a World Health Organisation warning the pandemic could not be controlled with such measures.
He also cautioned governments to implement “trace-and-isolate” systems to tackle the pandemic along with guidance from the International Civil Aviation Organisation’s ‘Takeoff’ guidelines.
The “sledgehammer” policies were not “economically or humanly sustainable”, he concluded.
Sourse: sputniknews.com
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