Airlines repeatedly speak of a veritable “freight boom” that has arisen as a side effect of the corona pandemic. In some markets considerable growth was actually achieved, but everything is different in Austria. Both the number of cargo flights and the volume of cargo fell rapidly in 2020.

A few days ago, Austrian Airlines celebrated that one with the “Preighter” OE-LPA the material moisture meter shows you the Cargofflug number 100 carried out Has. At first glance this is a positive number, but on closer inspection it quickly becomes clear: The Boeing 777 was downright flat for most of 2020 because the machine was downright underemployed.

For AUA, entering the cargo business was a necessary decision in order to be able to earn at least a little bit of money. You earn money with pallets, packages or whatever on board, on the ground there are exorbitantly high costs every day with zero income. In this respect, the decision was certainly not wrong, but the AUA was not able to benefit from any “demand boom” in the cargo sector.

2020 was an extremely weak cargo year

The “bare numbers” speak for themselves, because in 2020 99.640.513 kilograms of freight arrived in the Alpine republic. A year earlier it was 113.053.073 kilograms. Despite many Chinese imports in the medical sector, this meant that 12 percent less freight arrived in Austria. In terms of exports, the industry had to give up quite a bit: In 2020, the outbound cargo volume was reduced by 41 percent to 58.884.900 kilograms. In 2019 it was 99.108.834 kilograms. There was also a 14 percent decrease in transit throughput to 29.796.050 kilograms. For comparison: in 2019 there were still 35.038.497 kilograms of freight in transit. If you look at the period between 2016 and 2020: The previous year was by far the worst year in the last five years in all respects, with the exception of transit.

Also in the previous year there were considerably fewer cargo flights to / from Austria. Here, too, it can be seen that when looking at the period of the last five years, by far the weakest result was achieved. In 2020, 57.204 incoming cargo flight movements were carried out. That was 2019 percent less than in 64, because at that time 159.976 cargo flights landed at Austrian airports. The picture looks similar: a decrease from 159.969 cargo starts in 2019 to 57.224 outbound cargo flights in the previous year, i.e. 64 percent fewer cargo flights started in the Alpine republic.

Strong declines in all four quarters

If one compares the freight volume of the four quarters of 2019 and 2020 with each other, it quickly becomes apparent that significant declines were recorded in all four parts of the year in the previous year. In concrete terms, this means that air freight in Austria has never benefited from an alleged “boom”, but rather has had to give way.

In the first quarter of 2020, the cargo volume in Austria fell by seven percent to 53.635 tons. In the same quarter of 2019, there were 57.777 tons of air freight. In the second quarter of the year the decline was even stronger: from 62.031 tons to 39.784 tons - a decrease of about 36 percent.

This downward trend continued in the third quarter as the volume fell from 61.810 tons to 44.448 tons - 28 percent less. There was no turnaround in the fourth quarter of 2020 either: 50.450 tons were counted. In direct comparison with the final quarter of 2019 (65.551 tons), a decrease of 23 percent.