CAPA summit: ‘Air travel up for full recovery by summer 2023’

The war in Ukraine is an unknown factor, but international air travel is expected to have fully recovered from the Covid-crisis in most regions by mid-2023, with Africa lagging behind until late 2023. That’s the view of four airline bosses at the CAPA Airline Leader Summit in Manchester on April 7. CAPA summit: ‘Air travel up for full recovery by summer 2023’.

In an opening panel discussion, Sir Tim Clark (Emirates), Tony Douglas (Etihad), Anko van der Werff (SAS), and Allan Kilavuka (Kenya Airways) discussed the current state of the industry. On April 6, IATA reported 115.9 percent higher revenue passenger kilometers (RPKs) in February compared to the same month of 2021 but still down 45.5 percent on 2019. This reflects that air travel has been getting out of the Omicron crisis. Eurocontrol is projecting traffic in Europe to return to 92 percent of 2019 levels by the end of the year.

Asked when air travel “will get through the clouds” (clear 100 percent), Tim Clark replied: “If you had asked me that question before the war in Europe, I would have said probably by the end of this year. But what’s going on at the moment, it may be delayed slightly until the summer of 2023.”
Tony Douglas is also subscribing to mid-2023. Etihad has been seeing some pretty strong figures in the past month that confirm that recovery is progressing: “In March, our load factors were higher than in 2019. Our first quarter result will show a profit for the first time in our eighteen-year history.” Although traffic in the Middle East has been at the lowest level of all regions, Gulf carriers like Emirates, Etihad, and Qatar Airways have kept the world connected during the pandemic by offering limited networks.