Asian Flights Continue to Recover

We track scheduled flights (what’s planned) and tracked flights (what took off) from a sample of the largest airports across the world.

Looking at data up to 25 July: 

• Global flights are at 86% of 2019 levels,with 108k departures per day (Chart 1).
• Asia continues to recover well, while US and European flight recovery has stalled recently (Chart 2).
• Asian departing flights rose the most on the week, led by Seoul and Tokyo (Chart 4). Aggregate departing European flights were modestly up, while there were declines in the US, led by Chicago, New York and Atlanta.
• In Europe, scheduled flights were cut on the week, particularly at Frankfurt, Munich and Rome. The difficulties may continue through the summer, with 15,700 European flights reportedly cancelled on the back of staff shortages and the ongoing pandemic. Additional troubles are expected to hit the continent from new COVID waves in Autumn and Winter.
• While Beijing flights grew strongly on the week, Shanghai dropped back. Both airports remain at low-capacity utilisation rates (Chart 5).
• For more information on recent changes in COVID cases, please see our weekend report by Dominique and Henry.

Information on long-term movements in flight data is available below.

US

UK

Italy

Spain

Germany

France

Canada

China

Japan

Hong Kong

South Korea

Singapore

Thailand

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 Researcher at Macro Hive. Ben studied BSc Financial Mathematics at Cardiff University and MSc Finance at Cass Business School, his dissertations were on the tails of GARCH volatility models, and foreign exchange investment strategies during crises, respectively.

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