Winter Snowstorm Causes Flight Disruptions in Atlanta

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 16 January, we find the following: 

• There were 8,267 departures and 9,692 planned flights – down 10.1% and 6.7% WoW, respectively. Globally, flight traffic remains higher than the start of 2021, but lower than 2020 and 2019 (Chart 1).
• In the US, departures and planned flights decreased 10.1% and 5.0% WoW, respectively. Atlanta saw the largest decrease (33.4%) as hundreds of flights were cancelled due to a winter storm in the South and on the East Coast (Chart 3). LAX registered a 3.1% reduction in departures. Capacity falls to 64% of pre-COVID levels (Chart 4).
• European air-traffic fall the most as the Omicron variant spreads rapidly within the continent. Departures and planned flights plunged 15% each on the week. Milan (27.9%), Barcelona (26.1%), and Gatwick (24.6%) suffered the most (Chart 3). Capacity drops to 58% of pre-COVID levels (Chart 4).
• Asia appeared least fazed with departures and planned flights down only 0.2% and 1.8% on the week, respectively. Seoul (6.5%), Hong Kong (2.6%), and Singapore (0.9%) saw the largest increase in air traffic with all others registering small decreases. Capacity remains at 62% of pre-COVID levels.

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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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