Oleg Sergeev: Dubai airport freight traffic increases in Q1 2021 despite pandemic

The growth was more than 3%, which indicates the significant resilience of the cargo industry to the impact of Covid-19.

Dubai Airports has summed up the results of the operation of Dubai International Airport for the first quarter of this year and compared them with the indicators of the previous year. The results showed that the degree of impact of the pandemic on freight traffic is significantly less than on passenger traffic.

From January to March, cargo traffic increased by 3.2% (to 550,811 tons), while passenger traffic fell by 67.8% (to 5.75 million people) compared to 2020. At the same time, 74% of airlines flying to Dubai airport served 63% of the destination, compared to what it was before the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic.

As an aviation expert, the official Dubai cargo statistics gives me great optimism. I hope that most of the airlines, including ZetAvia, which transports cargo to the Middle East, Europe and Africa on IL-76 aircraft, believes in the rapid recovery of the aviation industry.

According to the Airports Council International (ACI), due to the impact of the pandemic, passenger traffic at the world's airports decreased by 64.6% and by 45.7% at the ten busiest airports in the world in 2020. Dubai dropped out of the TOP 10 in terms of the total number of passengers in 2020, but took first place in the number of passengers on international flights. The busiest airport in the world last year was China's Guangzhou Bai Yun International Airport.