By Vincenzo Claudio Piscopo
ITA Airways Continues Upward Passenger Trend As It Prepares for Summer
ITA Airways shared that on May 20 the fledging airline carried 30,000 passengers on a single day for the first time since the start of its operations last Oct. 15, 2021. The airline still sits a long way from the approximately 80,000 passengers per day that the former Italian flag carrier — Alitalia — carried on average during the last few months before bankruptcy officially occurred in October 2021.
However, the new Italian flag carrier is confident and is looking forward to strong growth in the upcoming 2022 summer season, with a positive trend in bookings now steady for more than two months. According to the airline, the most popular destinations for customers booking travel are those in South and North America such as Los Angeles, São Paulo and Buenos Aires, in addition to some Japan as well as the Mediterranean. The airline recently added flights to the Italian, Greek, Spanish and Croatian islands. In more detail, there will be seasonal flights with connections between Rome and Milan to Lampedusa and Pantelleria in Italy, Corfu, Heraklion and Rhodes in Greece and Ibiza, Menorca and Majorca in Spain.
Toward Japan, there is also a lot of interest for the summer on the airline’s Rome to Tokyo route, which will be operated with Airbus A350-900s starting June 1. The route will presumably be operated with five flights per week on Mondays, Wednesdays, Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays and starting in August, probably on a daily basis.
ITA Airways also stands out for other excellent results. According to FlightStats data from Cirium, ITA Airways is the top airline in Europe for punctuality with 90.8% of flights landing on time.
Another A350 Joins the Fleet
Also noteworthy is the arrival yesterday in the fleet of the airline’s second Airbus A350-900 dedicated to Marcello Lippi, the coach of the Italian national soccer team that won the 2006 World Cup. Clearly, at this time, the flag carrier has yet to carry out the cycle of qualification and type qualification activities for pilots on this type of long-range aircraft just added to the fleet.
The aircraft registered EI-IFB has been prepared to begin flight activities alongside the first Airbus A350-900, dedicated to MotoGP champion Valentino Rossi, with registration EI-IFA, which arrived a week and a half ago. These aircraft, will be crucial for long-haul intercontinental routes and the certification activities will take several more days until the Italian flag carrier completes them.
The addition of this type of aircraft to the fleet will enable ITA Airways to contribute to the goal of reducing CO2 emissions by 750 thousand tons over the four-year period (2021-2025), as the Airbus A350-900 enables a 25 percent reduction in fuel consumption.
Vincenzo graduated in 2019 in Mechanical Engineering with an aeronautical curriculum, focusing his thesis on Human Factors in aircraft maintenance. Currently, he is pursuing his master’s degree in Aerospace Engineering at the University of Palermo, Italy. He combines his journalistic activities with his work as a Safety and Reliability Engineer at DMD Solutions.
