Air travel to and from the UK drops 71% in 2021 amid a pandemic | Aircraft industry

Air travel to and from the UK fell 71% in 2021 as the second year of the Covid-19 crisis called for international air travel, according to a report.

Just over 406,000 international flights were operated from the UK as of December 22 this year, compared to nearly 1.4 million in 2019 before the pandemic broke out and travel restrictions were imposed, aeronautical analyst Cirium said. Domestic flights in the UK have been found to have decreased by almost 60%.

International travel has been slow to recover due to changes in testing and quarantine requirements over the course of the year and fears that countries may be added to the UK Red List that provide for mandatory hotel quarantine for 10 days.

Low-cost airline Ryanair remained the UK’s largest airline, according to Cirium, operating more than 100,000 UK flights in 2021, followed by easyJet with more than 82,000 flights, while British Airways was third with 77,460 flights.

The busiest international route was between London’s Heathrow and New York’s JFK, although the US didn’t reopen its borders to British travelers until November. Travelers from the USA have been able to fly to Great Britain since July 28th. BA, Virgin Atlantic, American Airlines, Delta Air Lines and JetBlue operated a total of 2,410 flights on the route.

However, the most popular were short-haul flights, with eight of the ten busiest routes to mainland Europe. These included London Heathrow to Amsterdam, Paris Charles de Gaulle and Frankfurt.

The UK’s busiest domestic route was the 51-mile flight between Land’s End in Cornwall to St Mary’s in the Isles of Scilly, with 2,330 flights that year.

Since new infections with Covid are skyrocketing across Europe and the USA and have reached record highs in Great Britain amid the rapid spread of the Omicron variant, the outlook for the next year remains uncertain.

Thousands of flights have been canceled in the past few days because employees tested positive for Covid-19 and bad weather in parts of the United States. As of Wednesday morning, a further 2,100 flights were canceled worldwide, according to the tracking website FlightAware, after 3,000 cancellations on Tuesday, including 1,300 to or from the United States. Globally, airlines have canceled more than 6,000 flights between Christmas Eve and Boxing Day, usually the busiest time of the year.

One in eight UK jobs in the travel and tourism sector – 205,000 jobs – will be unfilled in early 2022, according to the London-based World Travel and Tourism Council. The staff shortage could “have a huge impact” on the UK’s economic recovery from the coronavirus pandemic, the WTTC said.

He called for a number of measures to address this problem, such as more support for remote work, retraining of workers and an increase in the number of apprenticeships. “If we cannot fill these positions, it could threaten the very survival of travel and tourism companies across the UK,” said Council Chairwoman Julia Simpson.

Regardless, Indonesia lifted the Boeing 737 Max ban more than three years after a Lion Air plane crashed from Jakarta in October 2018, killing 189 people. In March 2019, a second 737 Max disaster occurred when an Ethiopian Airlines plane crashed shortly after take-off in Addis Ababa, killing 157 people. As a result, Boeing’s best-selling aircraft was discontinued worldwide.

On Monday, Ethiopian Airlines announced that it would resume 737 Max flights in February.