Air traffic 68% down in Q1

NAV Portugal managed 50,728 flights in the first quarter of 2021, representing a 68.6% drop compared to the same period last year 161,579 flights were controlled, it said on Friday.

NAV explained that the sharp variation in the total number of flights controlled in the first three months of the year is because it is being compared to the same period last year when the effects of the pandemic were only felt during March.

Despite the sharp drop, NAV pointed out that the drop in air traffic is being felt in different ways in different regions.

In Lisbon, NAV controlled 33,861 flights in the first quarter, 73% less than the 126,000 recorded in the same period of 2020.

On the island of Santa Maria, in the Azores, the decline was 52.5%, with a drop from 35,000 movements managed in 2020 to 16,800 in the first quarter of this year.

“Even with the evolution of traffic in the coming months shrouded in much uncertainty, it is expected that the figures for the second quarter of this year will bring an improvement when analysed on a year-on-year basis. However, it should be stressed that this is mainly because the second quarter of 2020 was the worst record of all of last year – traffic managed by NAV between April and June last year fell by 91.4%,” NAV pointed out.

The president of NAV Portugal’s Board of Directors, Manuel Teixeira Rolo, said that “it is increasingly clear that the crisis caused by the pandemic is not something temporary, especially in the aviation sector, where the shockwaves of the abrupt interruption of traffic flows will continue to be felt for several years.”

“Although traffic began to show some signs of a tenuous recovery in April compared to 2020, we are still, and will remain, a long way from the 2019 figures,” he added.

The total number of flights managed by NAV, or “movements”, includes flights originating or arriving at Portuguese airports and those that fly over airspace under Portuguese responsibility, which totals more than 5.8 million square kilometres.