Cancellations to Weigh on Europe into Summer

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 11 July: 

• Global flights are at 86% of 2019 levels,with 108k departures per day (Chart 1).
• The recent recovery in Asia has been partly offset by declines in the US (Chart 2). YTD recovery may be at risk from rising flight cancellations.
• However, this week saw growth in both American and Asian flight departures, while European flights declined, led by Munich and Heathrow. The slowdown may continue through the summer, with 25,000 August flights from around the globe reportedly cancelled on the back of staff shortages and the ongoing pandemic.
• The bulk of the problem has been seen in Europe, where Turkish Airlines has led by number of flights cancelled, followed by BA, easyJet and Lufthansa.
• Meanwhile, in China, recovery continued in Beijing and Shanghai. The former is now operating above half its capacity, while the latter is at a third (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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