Strikes in Germany Drag on Global Flight Departures

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 20 February 2023:

• Global departures are edging higher, with the seven-day moving average a touch below 110,000 a day and just above the 2019 level (Chart 1).
• Issues regarding China’s re-opening appear over; China has declared victory over Covid-19 while the 27 EU member countries and Schengen agreed to phase out testing requirements on travellers from China. Originally, travel measures were provided as optional guidelines for EU members to adopt. France, Italy, Spain, Sweden and the Netherlands notably did so. France was one of the first to reverse their decision.
• Turning to the details, departures crept up from Asia (+0.7% WoW) with Beijing and Hong Kong (+3.4%) seeing the biggest increases. US (-0.2%) and European departures (-0.7%) moved marginally lower over the past week. The latter proved most interesting with flights numbers collapsing out of Germany (Frankfurt: -14.7%; Munich: -9.1%), on the back of nation-wide strikes, but soaring higher out of London Gatwick (+7.9%) as families get away for school holidays.

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 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.

Photo Credit: depositphotos.com

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