THE GLOBAL airline industry will take at least three years to recover after the worst recession in six decades hurt travel demand, said Giovanni Bisignani, chief executive of the International Air Transport Association.

The airline industry globally lost $50 billion in the past 10 years, with $11 billion in 2009 alone. Revenues declined by $80 billion last year, Bisignani said.

“These numbers are really shocking,” Bisignani said in an interview in Singapore today. “We’ve had a terrible 10 years. It would take at least three years to recover the level of growth we have lost.”

Airlines worldwide suffered the worst drop in passenger demand since World War II last year, IATA said on Jan. 27.

The global travel slump has pushed carriers including Singapore Airlines Ltd. and British Airways Plc into losses and forced Japan Airlines Corp. to file for bankruptcy.

Traffic, a measure of passengers flown multiplied by the distance travelled, dropped 3.5 percent last year, with declines exceeding 5 percent in Europe, North America and the Asia- Pacific region, said IATA, which represents 230 carriers.

The economic slump and credit crisis have cost carriers 2 ½ years of growth in passenger markets and 3 ½ years in freight, so that 2010 will be “another spartan year” of cost controls and capacity caps, Bisignani had said earlier.

British Airways, Europe’s third-biggest carrier, expects a “bigger loss” in the 12 months ending March 31 than it had in fiscal 2009, Chairman Martin Broughton said on Jan. 25. Singapore Air, the world’s second-largest carrier by market value, may have its first annual loss as a publicly traded company, the carrier said in July.

Touching on bankruptcy,  Japan Air this month became Asia’s first major flag carrier to seek bankruptcy protection after four government bailouts failed to revive the region’s most indebted carrier.

More airlines will go bankrupt, Bisignani said today. About 34 carriers have gone out of business since 2008, according to IATA. Passenger yield, or the average price a traveler pays to fly one kilometer, will remain “flat” this year and increase only next year, Bisignani said.

Globally, airlines will probably post losses totaling $5.6 billion this year, the trade group had estimated. That’s about half of last year’s estimated $11 billion deficit.

While the industry’s worst loss to date was almost $13 billion in 2001 following the Sept. 11 terror attacks, an $80 billion revenue decline last year was “vastly bigger” than anything previously experienced, according to IATA Chief Economist Brian Pearce.- Bloomberg