Finnair carried a total of 953,000 passengers in March 2023 with the passenger load factor at 77.7%. The airline carried 112,400 passengers to Asia; 540,600 passengers to Europe; 47,500 passengers to the Middle East; 31,400 passengers to North America, and 221,100 passengers domestically in Finland. The drop in number of passengers from Asia is due to the ongoing conflict in Ukraine and the ban of Russian airspace.
“Further, Russian airspace was closed already during the comparison period, which resulted in route and frequency cancellations in Asian traffic. The negative impact of the Russian airspace closure on Asian passenger traffic figures was, however, visible in March 2023 compared to the pre-pandemic figures. The distance-based reported traffic figures do not take into account longer routings caused by the airspace closure as they are based on Great-Circle distance,” the airline said in a statement.
Finnair was previously dependent on using Russia's airspace on flights to Asia.
In a positive note, the airline reported that 84.6% of its flights were on-time.
On the cargo front, the airline carried total of 11,321.8 tonnes of cargo in the March 2023 with the cargo load factor of 57.1%. The region with the highest cargo tonnage came from Asia, where Finnair carried 6,002.1 tonnes of cargo
“Many cargo figures increased year-on-year in March due to Qatar Airways cooperation and increased Asian capacity even though discontinued operations between Sweden and the US cut North Atlantic cargo capacity. Available scheduled cargo tonne kilometers increased by 28.2% year-on-year and revenue scheduled cargo tonne kilometers increased by 18.3%. The total cargo tonnes increased by 16.3% year-on-year. Month-on-month increase of 14.6% was mainly explained by the longer month,” the airline said in the release.
As a part of the summer schedule the airline will fly 21 weekly flights to North America, with direct flights to New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, and more.