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Open Skies for Africa
would generally provide a comprehensive picture of an air service market, the revenue passenger-kilometers and available seat-kilometers of an air carrier are mostly disclosed on a fleet-wide basis only so as not to indicate specific route profitability to competitors.1 This is especially true in fragmented international markets, where often only a few carriers dominate certain routes. The standard source for air traffic data collected by airlines and airports is ICAO, which has developed statistics and forecasting programs that are based on data it collects from its contracting states that it then compiles into multiple data series. ICAO’s database is known as the integral statistical database (ICAO 2007). The data include information on commercial air carriers (traffic, on-flight origin and destination, traffic by flight stage, fleet personnel and financial data), on airports (airport traffic by passengers and aircraft movements from international airports, and financial data), on air navigation service providers (financial and traffic data), and from civil aircraft registries.2 However, the data are based on reporting by states and are often incomplete, inaccurate, and/or unreliable, especially when provided by developing countries whose statistical capacity is limited often because of a lack of training and of funding for adequate staff. Indeed, during several missions to Africa from 2002 to 2008 the author observed, for example, that actual passenger counts were often maintained on paper ledgers with no computerization. In many cases these data were never submitted to ICAO, leaving exceptionally large data holes in any time series. In addition, many contacting states believe that they need to report data only about international traffic to ICAO given that ICAO’s mandate focuses primarily on international air services. As an alternative, official airline schedules, which are in the public domain, are the best source of data for air traffic analysis for developing countries. The limitation of such data published by airlines is that schedules capture the capacity offered only in terms of seats between two points, not the number of actual passengers carried. Nevertheless, given the assumption that no airline would, over time, operate an aircraft that is not filled sufficiently to render the flight economically feasible, one could hypothesize that at any given point in time, 50 to 70 percent of the seat capacity offered on a route would approximate the actual number of passengers carried. One could also hypothesize that even with certain changes in load factors, the overall trend in seat capacity would approximate actual traffic trends over time. Finally, given that airline schedules are readily available and provide additional information such as type of