Air Traffic Remains Volatile

The first AEA traffic report for 2003 shows an increase in passenger-km of 6.4 percent over January of last year. This brought traffic volume back to within 1.5 percentage points of where it had stood in January 2001.

Even allowing for the volatility of the baseline, in most respects, the figures appear to be substantially less favorable than in the previous month. On European routes, an 8.8% increase in December was more than halved to 4.2%. On the North Atlantic, a 19.2% traffic recovery in December became a 10.9% increase in January. As for March, it seems inevitable that conflict in the Middle East would abruptly put an end to the brief period of recovery.