The Association of African Airlines’ (AFRAA) latest Africa Air Transport Report 2020 shows how air routes in South Africa and its neighbouring countries were decimated by the 2020 Covid-19 pandemic.
While air is still largely limited in 2021 due to the Covid-19 pandemic, especially for businesses, it has slowly normalized. However, the damage caused by the pandemic has marked the spirits as AFRAA pointed out.
Financially, 2020 is an exceptionally challenging year in history, he said, with an estimate of the loss of passenger earnings through African airlines in 2020 at $10. 21 billion.
The number of scheduled passengers carried via African airlines increased from 95 million in 2019 to 34. 7 million in 2020, a year-on-year decrease of 63. 7%. The easing in traffic continued until June, before reversing with the slow opening of borders.
In southern Africa, the covid-related traffic decline reached 63. 6% through 2019. The few flights that took up positions were declining domestically, AFRAA said.
The domestic market in Southern Africa remained dominant, rising from 66% of all traffic before the Covid outbreak to 77% in the last quarter of 2020. At the other extreme, intra-African traffic has declined, as has open-air traffic. continent.
The interior routes of South Africa are the most difficult on the continent. In 2019, 8 of the 10 busiest inland routes in Africa were in South Africa. However, that figure dropped to just six of the top 10 busiest routes in 2020.
The two roads that collapsed were the Cape Town – Lanseria and Lanseria – Durban routes, largely because Lanseria Airport did not resume operations until the end of the year.
The direction from Cape Town to Joburg is the busiest road on the continent. The road saw only around 4 million passengers in 2019, however, after the Covid crisis, this direction was reduced to around 1. 75 million in 2020.
The busiest routes in South Africa in 2020 were:
A similar trend was observed with intra-African travel during the year.
In 2019, 3 intra-African addresses from South Africa were among the busiest, with the Harare – Johannesburg address being the busiest. More than 400,000 people took this flight in 2019; However, by 2020, that number dropped to around 150,000.
While 3 South African routes were still listed, the number of travelers was particularly truncated in 2020.
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