For the first time in history, Kyiv Boryspil International Airport entered the top 15 busiest airports in Europe.
Competing against 341 other airports in Europe, Ukraine’s main international gateway took 14th place in terms of passenger traffic during the January-April period this year, the airport announced on June 24.
Outperforming airports in Europe’s major cities like Barcelona, Rome, Athens, Munich, Warsaw, Vienna, Berlin and Tel-Aviv, Boryspil airport is on the road to recovery after a devastating year for air travel due to the coronavirus pandemic.
Boryspil airport served 1.75 million passengers during the first four months of 2021, which is 28.3% less than the same period in 2020, and a 54% drop from the traffic in 2019. Most of them traveled internationally.
Ukraine’s airline hub was a little over 415,000 passengers short of taking over Paris-Orly Airport – France’s second-largest airport – ranked the 13th busiest in Europe, and about 465,000 passengers short from the 12th ranked Heathrow Airport in London.
The latest figures published by the Airport Council International (ACI) also indicate that Istanbul Airport was once again the busiest airport in Europe with passenger traffic surpassing 7.5 million during the January-April period.
Moscow Domodedovo Airport ranked second serving 6.3 million passengers and another Russian airport, Sheremetyevo International Airport, took third with 6.2 million passengers.
Volodymyr Zhmak, chairman of the Supervisory Board at Kyiv’s Boryspil Airport, said the anti-crisis program that was launched last year helped the airport resume operation in midst of the pandemic.
While the state-owned Boryspil airport was able to restore 60% of flights from pre-pandemic times in May, other European countries that are members of Eurocontrol, an international organization that promotes aviation safety, have only been able to recover about 39% of the total flights, according to the chairman.
Zhmak now expects “a full-fledged restoration of air communication with the EU countries” to meet the anticipated growth in passenger numbers.
Despite the positive news, significant demand shocks from the previous year still haunt the entire aviation industry, including Boryspil airport. In 2020, Boryspil airport’s passenger traffic suffered a 66.2% drop as a result of the coronavirus pandemic.
But aviation expert Kyryl Novikov said that Boryspil airport had the advantage of being the only airport in the country that was allowed to work during the lockdown last year. Some small regional airports like the ones in Ivano-Frankivsk and Chernivtsi lost more than 80% of the passenger traffic.
Novikov called Boryspil airport’s achievement a “good result” but also said that most of Europe went through a much stricter lockdown than Ukraine did during the January-April period.
Warsaw Chopin Airport, ranked as the 31st busiest airport in Europe, would have served a lot more passengers than Boryspil airport if the country was not under a strict lockdown, the expert said.
Air travel forecast
With the world opening up again, the passenger traffic at Boryspil airport had been gradually increasing, Novikov said.
Novikov doubts that Boryspil airport will ever make it in the top 10 busiest airports in Europe because airports like the one in Istanbul or Paris have been airline hubs for a long time, but “12th or 13th place is realistic.”
The decision to terminate flights with Belarus that came into force late May, however, has had quite a large impact on the passenger traffic in Ukraine, the aviation expert said. Passengers from Belarus often used Ukrainian airports as a transit en route to various destinations.
Regardless, Novikov emphasized that a faster vaccination rate will save Ukraine’s aviation. He forecasts that the country’s air traffic will reach a pre-pandemic level by the end of 2023 while it may take an additional year for the global air traffic to fully recover.
Boryspil airport saw the light at the end of the tunnel in March when the passenger traffic increased for the first time in a year since the beginning of the pandemic. In 2020, the airport served a total of 5.16 million passengers, which is almost 60% of the total air traffic in the whole country.
2020 was the worst year in history for air travel demand, with the global passenger traffic falling by 65.9% from the previous year, International Air Transport Association reported.
