The challenges of the airline industry are captured in this week’s data; short-term growth clouded by the reality of having to cut another 7.9 million seats from the planned July schedules.
For every positive indicator, there seems to be an immediate response with further lockdowns or bubbles deflating. This weekend saw a very small Covid-19 outbreak in Australia, well small by the rest of the world’s standards, and the Tasman bubble is closed, four states have put travel restrictions in place proving that a zero-based Covid approach just will not work for the aviation industry.
With 75.5 million seats on offer, this week will be the busiest week since the pandemic event started in January 2020, so that is good news and a 4.2% increase on last week’s capacity is indeed positive. However, just for context this week two years ago we were busy counting the 116 million seats that operated; we remain 35% below pre Covid-19 levels and this may be as good as it gets in 2021 at least…