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 4 October, we find the following:
• On Sunday, there were 10,257 scheduled departures globally and 9045 actual take-offs, down 2.1% and 4.4% week on week, respectively. Globally, current flight numbers are approaching 2021 highs
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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 4 October, we find the following:
- On Sunday, there were 10,257 scheduled departures globally and 9045 actual take-offs, down 2.1% and 4.4% week on week, respectively. Globally, current flight numbers are approaching 2021 highs but remain below 2019 levels (Chart 1).
- Three weeks of flight gains have been marginally tracked back. This week scheduled and actual flights decreased 0.68%and 1.21 % week on week, respectively. Tracked flights for Chicago decreased the most (3.7%), followed by JFK (1.5%), the only increase came in Dallas (0.2%) (Chart 3). Overall, there were 4,074 flight departures from our selected US airports. Capacity is at 78% of pre-COVID levels (Chart 4), Los Angeles (81%) and New York (75%) remain highest and lowest, respectively.
- European air traffic continued to decrease for the third week running – planned flights were down 4.97% and actual flights 4.82% week on week. Rome and Barcelona experienced the largest decrease (17.2% and 9.9%) week on week (Chart 3). On capacity, Milan Bergamo remains highest for the seventeenth week (87%), Gatwick remains lowest (39%). On average, European airport capacity stands at 63% of pre-COVID levels, 3pp lower than last week.
- Asian flight traffic decreased most out of our three regions; scheduled flights decreased just 0.83% while take-offs decreased 11.42%, almost entirely reversing last week’s 11.44% gain. The weekly fall was driven mainly by Beijing (27.2%) and Hong Kong (16%) (Charts 2 and 3). Overall capacity stands at 56% of pre-COVID levels, eight weeks prior Shanghai sat lowest at 2%, now highest at 69%. Since, Singapore has remained lowest (28%).
Information on long-term movements in flight data is available at the bottom of the page.