Air traffic taken over by China
Last summer, China Eastern Airlines announced that it was increasing its European capacity to 19 routes and 244 weekly round trips.
China Southern Airlines, which recently launched a direct service from Budapest to Guangzhou, now serves 11 destinations in Europe.
The largest Chinese passenger carrier flying to Europe is Air China, which counts “32 routes and 53 daily flights, exceeding the 2019 level by 116 percent,” the Global Times, a publication owned by the Chinese Communist Party, reported.
Chinese airlines now account “for 77 percent of traffic between China and Europe, up from 50 percent pre-pandemic,” analyst Piotr Grobelny wrote in October. “In some markets, like Italy and the U.K., Chinese carriers now hold as much as 100 percent and 95 percent of the market, respectively.”
“For the European carriers, the strategy at the moment is to acknowledge the injustice, but they have been fairly quiet on the point, accepting the political realities,” Andrew Charlton, managing director of the Aviation Advocacy consultancy, said. “They could try to lobby for competitors to have to honor the airspace closure too, but that is never really going to fly.”
Walsh argued that the closure of Russian airspace “has nothing to do with safety, nor with security” and said that the European airlines are “the victims of politics.”
“I would hope that we’ll see an end to the war in Ukraine and that we will see a return to a more normal environment,” he added. “Maybe that’s wishful thinking, but I would expect that that’s what everybody wants to see.”
CORRECTION: This article has been updated to clarify who is being quoted.
