Flight Tracker: Departures to Decline as We Enter Autumn
- 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 are continuing to decline from their summer peak, in line with historic seasonality.
- Asia is faring worst, exacerbated by China and a typhoon in Tokyo, while the turndown may start hitting Europe and the US soon.
Are Airports Getting Busier?
Global flights are at 80% of 2019 levels, with the number of flights falling to around 101,000/day having peaked in the summer (Chart 1). Historic seasonality would suggest flight numbers will continue to decrease.
Flight Data by Region
Asia
Departures in Asia are collapsing, down 4.2% over the past week (Chart 2 and 4). The fall has been exacerbated by continued lockdowns in China and Typhoon Nanmadol affecting Tokyo. However, there is promise: Chengdu is no longer under lockdown while the number of medium- and high-risk areas in China is plummeting (Chart 3).
Europe and the US
Europe may be nearing the end of its year highs; departures fell -2.5% WoW. Indeed, cases are expected to pick-up through the colder months – Germany has already reintroduced a mask mandate for long-distance trains.
Meanwhile, the US (+1.1% WoW) was the only region to see an increase in the number of departures over the past week, though this is likely not the start of a trend higher with Autumn fast approaching.
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.