Last year, the commercial aviation industry carried more than 3 billion passengers and nearly 48 million tons of cargo on nearly 100,000 flights per day, reports the International Air Transport Association (IATA), which has just published an extensive statistical information and analysis in the 58th edition of the World Air Transport Statistics (WATS).
Highlights of 2013 performance include:
*System-wide, airlines carried 3.129 billion passengers on scheduled services, up 5.1% over 2012.
*The U.S. (with 618.1m passengers, up 3.3% over 2012) is still the largest single air market in the world, in terms of total two-way traffic, international and domestic.
*People’s Republic of China (404.2m, +11.8%) was the top country in Asia-Pacific;
*UK (177.9m, +3.7%) was the top country in Europe; Brazil (92.9m, + 4.5%) was the top country in Latam-Carib; UAE (45.3m, + 11.7%) was #1 in the Middle East.
Airlines in Asia-Pacific carried the largest number of passengers of any region. The regional ranking (based on total passengers carried on scheduled services by airlines registered in that region) is:
*Latin America and the Caribbean (240.5m, +7.6% )
*Middle East (157.9m, +8.8%)
*Africa (73.8m, +5.6%).
*Airlines added over 1,100 direct airport-pair services and 600,000 frequencies in 2013, for a new total of 50,000 direct airport-pair services and 31.5m frequencies.
*The price of air travel in real terms fell by 7.4% compared to 2012.
*Star Alliance maintained its position as the largest airline alliance in 2013 with 26.6% of total scheduled traffic (in RPK), followed by SkyTeam (20.1%) and oneworld (15.4%).
