European Air Travel: More Than a Million Flights Performed in July

Air travel in Europe is showing good signs of recovery, with air travel up 7% in July 2023 compared to the same month in 2022. The total number of flights exceeded 1 million – this happened for the first time since September 2019, a few months before the world was faced with the Covid 19 pandemic.

The data comes from the latest report by Eurocontrol, the European air traffic control body, which also highlights that “South-Eastern Europe accounted for a significant portion of the growth.”

Experts mention that in the summer of 2023, air traffic control faced great difficulties, as a significant increase in the number of flights coincided with a simultaneous reduction of European airspace by nearly 20% due to the armed conflict in Ukraine. Added to this were extreme weather conditions in July, which caused ATFM (Air Traffic Flow Management) system failures and, consequently, flight delays that were two and a half times higher than in the same period of 2022. The problem was particularly acute in Germany, Hungary, and Serbia, where passengers experienced inconveniences at Frankfurt, Gatwick, and Munich airports.

Nevertheless, Eurocontrol emphasizes that after factoring out the weather and abnormal heat, the delays for each flight, on the contrary, have decreased by almost a quarter.