Short-haul operators in Europe have been seeing almost no growth in passenger numbers and have struggled to reduce capacity to offset lower traffic as the global economic downturn has turned to recession. After a disappointing 2008 that saw load factors fall, European Regions Airline Association (ERA) members now suffer “a considerable worsening” in demand. Recognition that a boom has always followed the doom in “cycles of about every eight years” is all that tempers the “full horror of the situation,” said ERA director-general Mike Ambrose.
The ERA official confirmed that member carriers are “cutting capacity to cater to the slump in demand,” something they had singularly failed to do effectively last year. New ERA statistics released in early April show that while revenue passenger miles grew by 3.5 percent last year over 2007, capacity grew by 4.6 percent, leading to an inevitable–albeit small–fall in scheduled passenger load factor.
