Posted
Airlines companiesNext summer, planes will have to fly at the same rate as before the Covid
The European Parliament has decided that airlines will have to use 80% of their take-off and landing slots. Otherwise, they risk losing them in 2024.
The 80% take-offs and landings rule was suspended in March 2020, when air traffic came to a sudden halt at the start of the Covid-19 pandemic. This was to prevent companies from operating empty flights in order to keep their slots.
AFP
From October 30, airlines will have to use 75% of their take-off and landing slots, on pain of losing them the following season, then 80% in the summer of 2023, as before the Covid-19 epidemic, decided on Thursday by the European Parliament. By 457 votes in favor (three once morest and three abstentions), MEPs, meeting in plenary session in Strasbourg, approved these new rules following a preliminary informal consultation with the Council of the European Union. This body representing the Member States must in turn approve them.
A return to pre-Covid requirements, with at least 80% of slots used, will apply in the summer of 2023, while the European Commission had proposed, in July, that this be the case from October 30. This 80% rule was suspended in March 2020, during the sudden halt in air traffic at the start of the Covid-19 pandemic, to prevent companies from operating empty flights, in order to keep their landing and take-off slots.
The carriers were then required, from March 28, 2021, to use 50% of their slots in order to be able to keep them. This level had then increased to 64% for the 2022 summer season (March 28 to October 29).
Possible exceptions
According to the air traffic monitoring body Eurocontrol, the level of air traffic will reach, in October, between 83% and 95% of the level before the pandemic, the European Parliament reported. MEPs nevertheless decided that exceptions to this increase in the rate of use of airport slots would be possible in the event of a health emergency, natural disaster or political unrest.
In addition, a possibility to restore air connectivity between the EU and Ukraine is foreseen for “when the time comes”, with “for example a recovery period of 16 weeks” before the rules for the use of slots come into effect. apply once more in Ukrainian airspace.
For companies, the summer ended “in style”
The summer, the peak period for air travel, ended “beautifully” this year, a “good progression” in demand allowing to find, in August, almost three quarters of the passenger traffic of the same month in 2019, the companies announced on Thursday. World traffic, expressed in passenger-revenue kilometers (RPK for its acronym in English), reached “73.7% of the pre-crisis monthly level” in August, said the International Air Transport Association (Iata). ).
This is certainly a slight erosion compared to July, when the sector had recovered 74.6% of RPK for the same month three years earlier, before the Covid-19 pandemic which ravaged the sector. But over one year, traffic jumped 67.7%, welcomed Iata, for which “the peak summer travel season in the Northern Hemisphere ended in style”. This dynamism is above all due to the massive recovery in international travel, with RPKs up 115.6% year-on-year, to reach 67.4% of the 2019 level.
(AFP)
