KUALA LUMPUR: Air travel is set to surpass the pre-pandemic year peak as it reaches 99 per cent of 2019 levels as recovery continues in November 2023.
The International Air Transport Association (IATA) said international traffic itself rose 26.4 per cent in November 2023 from the same month in 2022 with Asia Pacific driving the strongest year-over-year growth at 63.8 per cent.
Other regions such as Europe, Middle East, Africa, North America and Latin America continued to show improvement as well.
"We're moving ever closer to surpassing the 2019 peak year for air travel. Economic headwinds are not deterring people from taking to the skies.
"International travel remains 5.5 per cent below pre-pandemic levels but the gap is rapidly closing and domestic markets have been above their pre-pandemic levels continuously since April (2023)," said IATA director general Willie Walsh.
Domestic traffic for November 2023 rose 34.8 per cent compared to November 2022 and 6.7 per cent above November 2019 level with strong growth in China as the country recovered from the Covid-19 travel restrictions that were in place last year.
IATA said US domestic travel reached a new high at 9.1 per cent over November 2019 as it benefitted from Thanksgiving holidays demand.
Walsh said aviation industry's rapid recovery from Covid-19 showed the importance of flying to people and businesses.
He said in addition to the industry's recovery, governments also recognised the urgency of transitioning from jet fuel to sustainable aviation fuel (SAF) for aviation's decarbonisation.
"The third conference on aviation alternative fuels (CAAF/3) in November saw governments agree that we should see five per cent carbon savings by 2030 from SAF. This was followed up at the COP28 (United Nations Climate Change Conference) in December where governments agreed that we need a broad transitioning from fossil fuels to avoid the worst effects of climate change," Walsh said.
He added that airlines did not need convincing to jump into the decarbonisation bandwagon as they have agreed to achieve net zero carbon emissions by 2050 and use SAF.
However, SAF production is still not enough to be used by airlines worldwide.
Walsh said IATA hopes that 2024 would be the year where governments follow-up on their own declarations and deliver comprehensive policy measures to incentivise the rapid scaling-up of SAF production.