Malpensa down, Linate and Sud-Corriere.it doing well

Italian airports could close the pandemic period at least a year earlier than international forecasts. In 2022, 164.6 million people transited through the airports of our country, more than double the amount of 2021 – characterized by restrictions, border closures, quarantines – and down by 15% compared to 2019, before the spread of the coronavirus. Thanks, above all, to the facilities of the South and the Islands. These are the data that emerge from the bulletin of Assaeroporti, the main trade association, which underlines the double face of last year: the first half influenced by the Omicron variant (-39% in the first quarter, -12% in the second), but then it recovered in the July-December period oscillating between -7 and -9%.

The budget

Going to analyze the actual passengers and eliminating the double counting on domestic flights (once in the departure airport and once in the arrival airport), the pure figure of travelers in the Italian skies of 131.89 million people, excluding in this case the customers who flew on private flights. The decrease compared to 2019 (when they were 160.23 million) of 17.7%, therefore little more than that -15% in the system. How come? Because the trend on the traffic segments was different. If national flows have in fact returned to pre-Covid values ​​(they had been 32.19 million in 2019, they were 32.05 million in 2022, i.e. -0.5%).

National and international

The international and intercontinental segment recovers less – precisely because of the restrictions, the quarantines imposed, the lack of flights in the first half of the year – which went from 128.04 million in 2019 to 99.84 million in 2019, down by 22%. To these are added the premium travelers of general aviation – i.e. private flights – which last year were 308,601, 20% more than in 2019, confirming the opposite trend to scheduled traffic during the pandemic.

Malpensa and Fiumicino down, Linate doing well

According to Assaeroporti, the recovery was driven by medium and small airports, many of which exceeded 2019 levels. If among the largest airports Milan Malpensa scores -26% and Rome Fiumicino -32.6% – due to the clear reduction in intercontinental flights, starting with those to Asia -, in the next category (airport between 5 and 15 million passengers) check the +17.5% of Milan Linate (thanks also to the fact that in 2019 it was closed for two and a half months for the reconstruction of the runway), +11.9% in Bari, +1.4% in Palermo and +0.6% in Naples. Brindisi (+13.6%), Alghero (+10.3%), Olbia (+6.3%) and Turin (+6.1%) are also growing. The ranking for passengers does not see changes at the top: Fiumicino closes in the lead with 29.36 million, Malpensa with 21.35 million, Bergamo with 13.16 (-5.1% vs 2019), Naples with 10.92 million.

The appeal

These numbers, according to the president of Assaeroporti Carlo Borgomeo, confirm that we are witnessing a strong recovery of air traffic in Italy, higher than that of many European countries, above all thanks to the excellent results of the summer season. The airports of the South and Islands, with over 51 million passengers and an increase of 2.2% on 2019, recover pre-Covid volumes faster, proving how central air transport is for the territories and the mobility of people and goods. Hence the invitation to quickly overcome the essentially ideological exclusion of our sector from the Pnrr.