Flight Tracker: China Keeps Zero-Covid as Cases Surge
- By Bilal Hafeez and Ben Ford
- 3 min read
Summary
- We track scheduled flights (what’s planned) and tracked flights (what took off) from a sample of the largest airports across the world.
- Global departures have seen (what we believe to be) a short-term reprieve, spiking higher over the past week and breaking the previous downward trajectory.
- China is struggling with a renewed surge in Covid-19 cases; the rest of Asia is not. Meanwhile, in Europe, Heathrow has been the busiest airport this summer!
- Overall, departures are declining in line with historic seasonality.
Airports Are Getting Busier?!
Global departures have stormed higher (to 106,993), breaking the previous downward trajectory (Chart 1). This is likely a short-term blip, given that the change came outside the major airports we track.
Flight Data by Region
Asia
China (Beijing: -31.5% WoW; Shanghai: -12.2% WoW) departure numbers have collapsed with Golden Week now concluded; the effect was not felt around the rest of Asia (Charts 2 and 4). The fall comes as state-owned People’s Daily reiterated that China must stick with dynamic zero-Covid while big Chinese cities have upped testing as cases surge (Chart 3). Notably, Shanghai has imposed new testing requirements for people arriving in the city. Excluding China, departures across Asia moved 0.5% lower WoW.
Europe and the US
Departures saw little change across the US (+0.3% WoW) and Europe (-0.6% WoW) as Heathrow Airport noted it had been the busiest European airport this summer. But the outlook for demand looks uncertain.
Appendix: Why Track Flight Data?
In the post-COVID era, it will become ever more important to track economic activity using alternative datasets. These can support traditional measures, such as GDP, which are released with a significant delay. One useful indicator we like to follow is air traffic volumes.
Aviation is an important economic sector, contributing at least 3% to GDP in the UK and the US. And using data from Flightradar24, we can track scheduled flights (what is planned) and tracked flights (what took off) from a sample of the largest airports around the world – all in real time.
Bilal Hafeez is the CEO and Editor of 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.