As my last article of this decade, I must address the very important issue of airline bankruptcies. Throughout this decade, we have seen an extortionate amount of airline bankruptcies, especially on the continent of Europe. I have explained why so many airlines have gone bankrupt recently in one of my previous articles, which is titled “Is 2019 a special year in aviation?”. It is on the blog post called “News Jan-16 Dec 2019”. But today, I will not be explaining why these airlines went bankrupt, but I will be comparing the differences in the amount of airline bankruptcies of the different years in this decade. Let’s first take a look at 2010. 2010 was the year in this decade where the most amount of airline bankruptcies occurred. To be precise, the number went up to 105. Back then, the airline industry was still suffering from the financial crisis of 2008, the year in which the most amount of airline bankruptcies ever occurred. Most airlines that went bankrupt in 2010 were mainly from all around the world, so there was no crisis in a certain part of the world. The continent of South America suffered the most, but only a bit more than others. Countries like Mexico and Brazil lost many important airlines, especially Mexico, who lost their flag carrier, Mexicana, because it went bankrupt. Now let’s take a look at the years 2011-2014. These years lost much less airlines than in 2010, and each year, apart from a small but insignificant rise in 2012, the amount of airline bankruptcies diminished steadily. The total of airline bankruptcies in 2011 was 81, whereas in 2014 it was 56. Those 4 years therefore showed a steady improvement for the airline industry. Asia and especially Europe were the biggest victims of that period. From 2015 to 2017 the amount of airline bankruptcies stayed steady, going from a total of 62 in 2015 to 57 in 2017. If we compare this to the first half of the decade, this is a big improvement. Again, Europe suffered a lot but this time with the addition of the USA. In 2018, we saw a massive rise in the amount of airline bankruptcies, the number rising to 73. Europe was especially weak in 2018, and even lost some big charter airlines such as Primera and Small Planet Airlines. Asia lost quite a few airlines as well in 2018, especially in Thailand and in South Korea. 2019 was a good year, with a total of 44 airline bankruptcies, the smallest amount throughout the entire decade. Thank you for reading this article and Happy New Year ! 31st of December 2019
Aeronews24 