Impact of Covid-19: update on airline capacity to Asia and Italy

With coronavirus clusters spreading within Europe, European airlines’ flight schedules to China remain very light for the coming weeks: all flights are now cancelled for the next six weeks, until the end of April, and the cancellation rate for flights to Hong Kong has risen above 50%. Air France and KLM are the only European operators offering flights to Beijing and Shanghai in the first half of April.

At the same time, European airlines have cut back their flights to Italy: to date, Lufthansa, Swiss and Austrian have cancelled 40% to 50% of their flights until the end of March, and British Airways around 30%.

Beyond this Italy-Europe axis, all intra-European flight schedules are affected. The course of the pandemic and the decisions of European states will determine the scale and evolution of these cuts in the coming days.

Lufthansa has announced that a very large number of its group’s aircraft will be grounded. What alternatives do European airlines have to redeploy part of their fleet to other routes?

These two points will be covered in our next weekly review of the impact of Covid-19 on air traffic.