Looking at the pre-pandemic year of 2019, when the total number of passengers reached 1.04 billion people, the number of passengers in air transport decreased by 64 percent, indicating that recovery was still far away. 

This information comes from data on air transport published by Eurostat. The article presents a handful of findings from the more detailed Statistics Explained article.

Data show that in 2021, all Member States, except for Finland (-16 percent), registered an increase in the number of passengers travelling by air compared with 2020. These increases varied among Member States, from +10 percent in Ireland, +16 percent in Sweden and +17 percent in Latvia to +86 percent in Greece, +105 percent in Cyprus and +129 percent in Croatia. 

Extra-EU passenger transport represented 39 percent of total air passenger transport in 2021. On the other hand, intra-EU transport represented 38 percent and national transport represented 23 percent. Compared with 2020, the share of extra-EU transport decreased by 5.5 percentage points (pp), while intra-EU transport increased by 4.5 pp; national transport increased by 1 pp.  

In 2021, the list of top 5 EU airports remained the same as in 2020, with Paris/Charles de Gaulle (26.2 million passengers), Amsterdam/Schiphol (25.5 million), Frankfurt/Main (24.8 million), Madrid/Barajas (23.2 million) and Barcelona/El Prat (18.5 million) leading the chart. 

Palma de Mallorca (14.5 million) is now in the top 10, and München (12.5 million) dropped three places being the top 10 airport that saw the smallest increase in the number of passengers in 2021 compared with 2020, +12 percent. 

Palma de Mallorca in Spain saw the biggest growth on that list, +137 percent compared with 2020, followed by Paris-Orly in France (+46 percent) and Athinai/Eleftherios Venizelos in Greece (+52 percent).