Global air traffic takes a step back as Covid-19’s delta variant deals a blow to nascent travel recovery

For the second week in a row, the recovery in global air traffic has taken a step back.

Airline seat capacity declined about a quarter of a percentage point to 68 per cent of the amount offered in the same week of 2019, before the Covid-19 pandemic disrupted a multi-year travel expansion fuelled by the rising number of middle-class tourists from China and Southeast Asia.

The latest setback, attributed largely to the spread of the delta variant, follows an almost 1-point decline the prior week, according to Bloomberg’s weekly flight tracker, which uses data from aviation specialist OAG to monitor the pulse of the comeback.

The biggest challenges are once again in Asia. The broadest virus outbreak in China since the pandemic first began has forced officials there to suspend flights and increase testing of airport workers. That’s taken a chunk out of the nation’s massive domestic aviation trade, which has performed the best among the largest pre-pandemic global markets.

In the US, capacity has been stuck for several weeks due to staffing constraints and slow progress toward lifting border restrictions with Europe and other markets. In Europe, the only region where so-called vaccine passports are in widespread use, the comeback made further progress, though it, too, will be limited by the failure to fully reopen transatlantic travel, according to Rob Morris, global head of consultancy at Cirium, which tracks air traffic.

The question for airlines now is whether vaccines can be distributed quickly enough to counter the spread of new coronavirus variants.

From the start of the year, carriers in China, India, the US and Europe, to name some, registered steady gains as they slowly added more flights to their schedules. But the rise of the delta variant has challenged the return to normalcy – first in India, then in the UK, and now in China and other Asian nations like Indonesia and Vietnam.