Recession is grounding air travel

Jun 17 2009 by Alun Thorne, Birmingham Post

The recession is taking its toll on the number of people taking holiday flights according to the latest passenger figures.

The number of charter flight passengers boarding or getting off at UK airports fell 20 per cent to 3.7 million in the first three months of this year compared with the January-March 2008 period, the Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) said. Scheduled flight passenger numbers dipped 12 per cent – from 46.1 million in the first three months of last year to 40.6 million in January-March 2009.

Overall, 44.3 million people boarded or disembarked at UK airports in the first three months of this year – 13 per cent down on the January-March 2008 figure. The number of actual flights to and from UK airports was also down – dipping 10 per cent to just over 450,000. Scheduled flights fell 9.7 per cent and charter flights were down 16 per cent. In the light of the present flu pandemic, the CAA published flight details from 1968-69 – the time of the Hong Kong flu pandemic during which there were an estimated 30,0000 UK deaths. Growth in passenger numbers at UK airports was more than 12 per cent a year in the early 1960s. The CAA figures showed that this rate of growth actually started slowing before the flu crisis began in September 1968 before recovering between 1969 and 1973. The CAA said that other factors most probably caused the downturn in passenger numbers in 1967 and 1968, “with the flu pandemic probably having only a minor effect on air traffic”.