Airports handled around three million passengers in November

National airports handled around three million passengers last November, equivalent to a 180.6% increase compared to the same month last year, marked by pandemic restrictions. Data published on Tuesday by Statistics Portugal (INE) shows that the air transport sector remains about 20% below pre-Covid levels, which represents an improvement when compared to October.

In November, 13,400 commercial aircraft landed at national airports, corresponding to 3.1 million passengers. As for freight and mail, 192,000 tonnes were handled, 35.2% more than in November last year.

Between January and November 2021, 22.9 million passengers were handled, equivalent to a 31.8% increase compared with the same month of 2020. During this period, “the movement of passengers in Lisbon airport corresponded to 46.5% of total handled passengers (10.7 million) and increased by 22.1%. In Faro airport, the movement of passengers in this period grew 44.4%, reaching 3.1 million passengers, which is still very far from the recorded value in the same period of 2019 (8.7 million passengers; -64.5%),” said the statistics office.

Looking to the volume of passengers disembarked and embarked on international flights between January and November 2021, France remained the main country of origin and destination of flights (about 1.68 million passengers), followed by the United Kingdom and Germany. INE highlights that since January, Switzerland has recorded the highest growth in the number of embarking and disembarking passengers (+34.7% and +31.6%, respectively).