European Departures Resilient to Slowdown

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 12 September:

• The decline in global departures has continued, down 6.3% from its peak and at 80.7% of 2019 levels (Chart 1), in line with historic seasonality. The decline has been exacerbated by renewed lockdowns across China.
• Asian departures steadied over the past week (-0.1%) despite a sharp decline from Beijing (-10.0% WoW). Excluding China from the data, departures have ticked higher over the past week, though are steadily declining (+0.3% WoW; Chart 2).
• Europe is faring well; departures continue to trend higher from the region (+1.9% WoW). However, as noted before, European countries are preparing for a potential pick-up in cases through the winter – Germany has reintroduced a mask mandate for long-distance trains. Meanwhile, the US saw an increase in departures over the past week (+1.1% WoW), though this is likely not the start of a trend higher with Autumn fast approaching.
• For more information on recent changes in COVID cases, please see our weekend report.

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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