Europe’s airlines are gradually resuming passenger operations as governments begin to relax lockdowns and travel restrictions, and Eurocontrol expects that more than 8,000 flights a day will operate across the European network in the second half of June. That would mark a quadrupling on the “rock bottom” of April 12, when just 2,099 flights operated across the network. The region’s air navigation service providers handled 5,090 flights on June 1. Commercial flight activity has started to show “some positive movement upwards,” asserted Eurocontrol director-general Eamonn Brennan. Still, flight volumes remain a fraction (15 percent) of their level a year ago.
Operators’ planning departments, however, are struggling to firm schedules and plan ungrounding of fleets owing to the lack of coordination between EU countries on reopening borders and differing health protocols. The European Commission last month released guidelines to EU countries, calling for a restoration of freedom of movement in the bloc in a harmonized, non-discriminatory way. But the recommendations are non-binding and member states are opening frontiers, removing travel bans, and imposing health safety measures on their own terms and at their own pace, leaving the bloc’s Single Aviation Market—once seen as one of the great successes of intra-EU cooperation and integration—and the passport-free-travel Schengen area fractured.
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