Grave Outlook on Departures from China

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 9 May, we find the following: 

• Global flights have steadily increased since the slowdown in April, now shy of 95,000, up 1.8% WoW (Chart 1).
• Zero-Covid strategy continues to suppress Chinese departures as Chinese Premier Li Keqiang warned of a ‘complicated and grave’ employment situation; some Beijing stores have started to close and American businesses in China are pulling investment and revising lower their revenue projections. It comes as China recorded 21 high-risk areas (all in Beijing), up from 12 last week. Departures from Beijing fell 24.3% WoW (Chart 3). In Asia ex-China, departures were healthier, up 1.2% WoW, while airports are operating at 63% of their pre-COVID levels (Chart 4).
• Departures from the US and Europe marched higher, up 0.8% and 3.7% WoW, respectively. European departures were led by a 9.5% WoW increase from London Gatwick and followed by strong increases from Frankfurt (5.7% WoW) and Munich (5.2% WoW). In terms of recovery, Europe leads, running at 89% of pre-COVID levels, versus 81% in the US.
• For more information on recent changes in COVID cases, please see our weekend report by Dominique.

Information on long-term movements in flight data is available at the bottom of the page.

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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