Have Flight Numbers Peaked?

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 2 August:

• Global flights are at 85.7% of 2019 levels, with departures inching lower to 107.7k per day (Chart 1). Indeed, this could be a near-term peak – they declined from here in 2019.
• Asia continues to recover better than the RoW with the recovery stalling in Europe and the US (Chart 2).
• Shanghai (+17.8% WoW) led the way, albeit from a low base (Chart 4). The improvement in the region coincides with China’s improving COVID-19 outlook and a low number of cases in the tier-cities. Right now, the world is more focused on a single flight – that of US Speaker of the House of Representatives Nancy Pelosi’s (available to view here, search ’09-0540’ to track her plane). Reports suggest she is scheduled to land in Taiwan either today or tomorrow, which is likely to provoke further angry rhetoric from China. Elsewhere, COVID restrictions are mostly lifted across Europe. The Netherlands, Luxembourg, and Spain are the only exceptions. However, the surge in demand, alongside staff shortages, has led to widespread flight cancellations across the region.
• 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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