Global Departures Plateau in Summer Peak

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

Global Departure Update

Looking at data up to 17 July 2023:

• Global departures are plateauing, averaging 132k a day since mid-July (Chart 1). Historically, global departures have declined from here.
• Since our last update, departures in Asia continued to grind higher, making it the best-performing region (including and excluding China) since the start of last year. However, China remains a caveat; most of China’s departures have remained domestic (87.9%), though international flights (12.1%) continue to increase.
• Turning to Europe, Milan (+7.5% WoW) saw the largest increase in departures over the past week. However, this reflects departures returning to normal following strikes at Malpensa Airport to end July, which saw 200 flights cancelled and 400 other delayed. This is part of strikes seen across European airports including in the UK, Belgium, Portugal, Spain and France.
• US departures (-0.4% WoW) marginally decreased over the past week as Atlanta (-6.0% WoW) saw further weather disruptions.

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

China

Japan

Hong Kong

South Korea

Singapore

Thailand

US

UK

Italy

Spain

Germany

France

Canada

Bilal Hafeez is the CEO and Head of Research at Macro Hive. He spent over 20 years at top global banks such as JPMorgan, Deutsche Bank and Nomura leading teams in FX, rates and cross market 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.

Photo Credit: depositphotos.com

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