Asia Leads Flight Demand for Second Consecutive Week

We track scheduled flights (what’s planned) and tracked flights (what’s in the air) from a sample of the largest airports across the world. Looking at data up to 18 October, we find the following: 

• On Sunday, there were 10,499 scheduled departures globally and 9,573 actual take-offs, up 0.3% and 2.5% week on week, respectively. Globally, flight traffic is approaching 2021 highs but remains below 2019 levels (Chart 1).
• US flight traffic changed only marginally. Scheduled flights dropped 0.58% but take-offs increased 2.26% with 100 more flights departing on 17 October versus 10 October. Chicago (3.5%), Dallas (2.9%), and Atlanta (2.8%) saw the largest gains. Capacity is at 79% of pre-COVID levels (Chart 4), Dallas moves back to the top in terms of capacity (82%), JFK remains the lowest (74%).
• European air traffic steadied after a large increase last week. Planned flights were up 0.3%, and actual take-offs 0.75%. Gatwick experienced the largest increase (5.5%), followed by Heathrow (4.7%) and Rome (3.4%) (Chart 3). On capacity, Milan Bergamo remains the highest (87%) and Gatwick the lowest (41%), albeit up 2pp from last week. On average, European airport capacity stands at 66% of pre-COVID levels, marking two weeks of gains.
• Asian flight traffic increased the most for the second consecutive week with scheduled flights up 1.93% and take-offs up 5.56%. Shanghai’s 13.8% gain drove the increase. Hong Kong (5.3%) and Beijing (4.9%) also saw strong gains (Chart 3). Overall, Asian capacity stands at 67%, a 3pp increase WoW and up 11pp increase since China’s Golden Week holiday. Shanghai joins Beijing in top spot in terms of capacity at 93%, Singapore is unchanged at 27%.

Information on long-term movements in flight data is available at the bottom of the page.

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Bilal Hafeez is the CEO and Head of Research at Macro Hive. He spent over twenty years doing research at big banks – JPMorgan, Deutsche Bank, and Nomura, where he had various “Global Head” roles and did FX, rates and cross-markets research.

Ben Ford is a macro research analyst at Macro Hive, and is currently finishing an MSc in Finance at Cass Business School.

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