• The International Civil Aviation Organisation (ICAO), the UN aviation agency, announced that air traffic levels are operating at around two per cent above their high in 2019, before the COVID-19 pandemic grounded much of the world’s population in lockdown.

• ICAO’s latest analysis also reveals new insights into aviation for the previous year 2023, revealing  that air traffic on most routes had already reached or surpassed pre-pandemic levels by the end of the year.

• However, most international Asian routes, with the exception of those serving South West Asia, continue to have substantially lower levels of traffic in 2023 compared to the pre-pandemic levels.

• The agency forecasts increasing traffic growth to around 3 per cent above 2019 levels, and possibly 4 per cent if the pace of recovery grows on routes which have not yet returned to pre-pandemic levels.

International Civil Aviation Organisation (ICAO)

• A specialised agency of the United Nations, the International Civil Aviation Organisation (ICAO) was created to promote the safe and orderly development of international civil aviation throughout the world. It sets standards and regulations necessary for aviation safety, security and facilitation, efficiency , economic development of air transport as well as to improve the environmental performance of aviation. 

• The Convention on International Civil Aviation, drafted in 1944 by 54 nations, was established to promote cooperation and “create and preserve friendship and understanding among the nations and peoples of the world.” 

• Known more commonly today as the ‘Chicago Convention’, this landmark agreement established the core principles permitting international transport by air, and led to the creation of the specialised agency which has overseen it ever since.

• On April 4, 1947, upon sufficient ratifications to the Chicago Convention, the International Civil Aviation Organisation (ICAO) was established. The first official ICAO Assembly was held in Montreal in May of that year.

• ICAO is funded and directed by 193 national governments to support their diplomacy and cooperation in air transport as signatory states to the Chicago Convention.

• The headquarters of ICAO is situated in Montreal.

• Its core function is to maintain an administrative and expert bureaucracy (the ICAO Secretariat) supporting these diplomatic interactions, and to research new air transport policy and standardisation innovations as directed and endorsed by governments through the ICAO Assembly, or by the ICAO Council which the assembly elects.

• ICAO is not an international aviation regulator. The stipulations ICAO standards contain never supersede the primacy of national regulatory requirements. It is always the local, national regulations which are enforced in, and by, sovereign states, and which must be legally adhered to by air operators making use of applicable airspace and airports.

• The Secretariat of the ICAO is headed by the Secretary General.

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