Cathay Pacific Airways is studying plans to park even more aircraft abroad in long-term storage, the Post has learned, with a recovery in air travel taking longer than anticipated.
Airlines across the world have teetered close to collapse, with borders closed and demand for air travel sapped by the disease. The vast majority of the Cathay group’s 235 planes are large widebody aircraft, which are not ideal for weak travel demand, and it does not have domestic flights to fall back on.
Coronavirus: what conditions should Hong Kong travel bubble carry?With passenger numbers still low, airlines struggled to generate revenue in July, and Brian Pearce, chief economist at the International Air Travel Association , said he expected that trend to continue. Meanwhile, a recovery of international travel in the Asia-Pacific region has been slow to materialise, although numerous places in an area hit earliest by Covid-19 have been quickest to get it under control.
“Unfortunately traffic has been stalled now for several months at unimaginably low levels, as the international market is limited to one-way repatriating traffic and a minuscule amount of essential business or government traffic,” he said.