Air travel is taking flight again

denied both the pleasures and tribulations of travel. The urge to make up for lost holidays and reunions with friends and families has brought the sort of airport holiday chaos that travellers avoided while covid-19 scuppered their plans. A rush to take advantage of school breaks caused recent misery in Europe. Passengers queued for hours at airports from Mallorca to Manchester, and flights were delayed or cancelled. Americans were furious after nearly 3,000 flights were scrapped in the four days around the Memorial Day weekend in late May. At least the hordes of unsatisfied customers are a sign that air travel is returning to normal. “Pent-up demand for travel is becoming un-pent,” says Andrew Charlton of Aviation Advocacy, a consultancy. The number of seats available on European airlines in the week commencing June 6th was only 9% below the same week in 2019. In North America it was just 5.6% down, according to , another consultancy. Japan, which was in effect shut to tourists for two years, said on May 26th that it would start to relax restrictions on visitors. With the exception of China, where severe recent lockdowns set back a strong recovery in domestic flying, the planes are back in the air at close to pre-pandemic levels.