Even by aviation’s normal standards, it has been a strange week. At the same time as some new airlines broke cover (Avelo Airlines), at least three major African airlines indicated that they have run out of cash, a bubble across the Tasman was announced, a major “Traffic Light” system for travel was launched with no signpost or directions and a major international airport has started charging for passenger drop offs today at a terminal that is closed! Can anyone make sense of what is happening? It’s madness!
And then to cap it all global capacity, after a winning streak of eight weeks growth, has seen a bit of a setback this week with capacity falling week on week by 1.4% wiping out the previous week’s growth. The UK’s new traffic light system to “support” the recovery resulted in over half a million seats being removed for May in the last week. Some of those capacity cuts may have resulted in the slight increases in capacity that we see week on week in July and…