ARCHIVED - Just 2,100 passengers at Corvera in April as the airport remains mostly dormant

Traffic at the Region of Murcia International Airport was 2 per cent of the level of April 2019

The almost total cancellation of international travel in Europe during the winter continued to have a devastating effect on the Region of Murcia International Airport in Corvera in April, when the data published by Aena relating to passenger numbers illustrated both the effect of the Covid pandemic and the way in which statistics can occasionally throw up misleading results!

On the face of it, the number of people passing through the terminal building at Corvera during the month was an incredible 9,000 per cent higher than in April 2020, a year-on-year increase which in normal circumstances would be viewed as a triumph. But the reality, of course, is that April 2020 was the first month in which air travel – and indeed all travel - was practically non-existent due to the pandemic, and that the increase from 22 passengers to 2,153 is actually an insignificant one.

Far more revealing is the comparison with April 2019, when those arriving and leaving the Murcia airport numbered almost 111,000: in other words, the figures are down by a devastating 98 per cent, and there were only 79 landings and take-offs during the whole of last month at the Region of Murcia International Airport.

Neither is Corvera the only airport suffering; Alicante airport lost 91.9 per cent of its traffic in April in comparison with the figures from 2019, and the decrease in the whole of the Aena network in Spain amounted to 84.2 per cent compared to two years ago.

What lies in store in the near future at Corvera remains uncertain, all the more so due to its traditional heavy dependence on flights to and from the UK. With no international airlines resuming normal service as yet it seems unlikely that the airport will become a hive of activity at least until the summer, and even then it may be the case that airlines prefer to operate fewer services and use Alicante-Elche rather than setting up direct routes to the Costa Cálida.

In Spain as a whole, Aena reports that the number of passengers arriving and departing on both international and domestic flights during the first four months of 2021 reached 11.9 million, representing a decrease of 84.3 per cent from the year before last. The busiest airports were, as ever, those of Adolfo Suárez Madrid-Barajas (3.56 million passengers after a fall of 80.8 per cent since 2019) and Barcelona El Prat (down by 89.3 per cent to 1.6 million).