Europe's aviation recovery slips as EUROCONTROL trims flights forecast

Europe's aviation capacity recovery has lost some momentum this week, but the gradual return to 2019's weekly seat numbers has never been a straight line improvement.

Moreover, EUROCONTROL has lowered its 2022 base scenario forecast of flight numbers in Europe's airspace from 89% of 2019 levels to 85%. This reflects the impact of the Omicron variant of COVID-19 since its previous forecast in Oct-2021. Its base scenario forecast of 85% in 2023 and 99% in 2024 are each reductions of 1ppt from its Oct-2021 forecast.

Europe's seat capacity has reached 85.6% of 2019 levels in the week commencing 6-Jun-2022, or a shortfall of 14.4% compared with the equivalent week 2019. This is 1.9 ppts worse than last week, which had been its best performance on this measure since before the COVID-19 crisis.

Europe remains fourth in the regional ranking, above Asia Pacific, where capacity is down by -27.8%, and the Middle East, where capacity is down by -21.5%. Africa capacity is down by -12.8%, North America is down by -8.3%, and Latin America by -4.3%.