Turnaround in March?
The world’s airlines have reacted to developments since March (see chart), but can still not provide the market with adequate capacities. In November international tonnage stood 15% below the same month year-on-year; yields climbed to above 50%.
Istanbul is getting a third chance. The Iata World Cargo Symposium, which was due to be held in the Turkish capital in March 2020, was initially postponed at short notice to March 2021. In December the global aviation body postponed the event once more, this time to 12–14 October 2021. The aviation industry hopes to have resumed intercontinental normality by then.
Ongoing recovery
At the beginning of January Iata revealed airlines’ cargo performance for November 2020. Globally, the monthly freight performance measured in ftk came in at –6.6% vis-à-vis November 2019. This was the first time since April that the fall was greater than in the previous month (October –6.2%).
However, November 2019, just before the Covid-19 downturn, was a “strong” month, Iata said, “with the influence of the Sino-US trade war just beginning to wane.” (See ITJ Daily of 9 January 2020.)
North American airlines were the only ones to do better in November 2020 than in the same month of the previous year, improving by 5%. Their result for the first eleven months is almost in balance (+0.1%), and was only beaten by that of African airlines (+0.3%). The latter’s market share is much lower, however. All of the airlines in all of the other regions deteriorated vis-à-vis the previous year. The Middle Eastern players’ figures fell by 10.7%, a little less than the Asian-Pacific airlines’ performance of –16.1%. Europe’s carriers lost 17.2% and Latin America’s 21.8%.
Banking on spring
All in all, the economic drivers proved resilient, but new lockdowns presented big challenges. The available ftk declined by about 20%, which leads us to conclude that there was unfulfilled demand. But according to Iata a series of indicators have pointed to a recovery to about the level of 2019 by “around March 2021, or thereabouts.”
