Press Statement

Preasráiteas

19 August 2020

Go to release: Aviation Statistics Quarter 2 2020

The Central Statistics Office (CSO) has today (19 August 2020) published Aviation Statistics for Quarter 2 2020. Passenger numbers are received for the five main airports: Dublin, Cork, Shannon, Knock and Kerry. Note: Knock was closed for the months of April, May and June.

Commenting on the release, Olive Loughnane, Statistician, said:

’The figures show a dramatic decrease in international travel during Q2 2020. In particular, data for April 2020 shows a fall of 99.2% in passengers handled by Irish airports compared to the same month in 2019. This is associated with restrictions imposed due to COVID-19.

In Quarter 2 of 2020, almost 72,000 passengers travelled to Ireland and 90,000 passengers departed from Ireland. These numbers represent a fall of 98.6% (5.1 million) and 98.3% (5.2 million) respectively, when compared to the same period in 2019.

The amount of air freight handled by the main airports decreased by 3.8% to 32,593 tonnes in the second quarter of 2020 when compared with the same period in 2019. However, freight in the first half of 2020 is up by 5.0% to 69,726 tonnes compared with the first half of 2019.’

Today’s figures also show a breakdown by route. In Q2 2020, almost nine out of every ten passengers (88.5%) on international flights were travelling to or from Europe. Within Europe, the United Kingdom and the Netherlands were the most popular routes.

Outside of Europe the most popular routes were to or from the United States of America.

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