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 21 November:
Time to Fly Home for Christmas?
Global departures have increased (+1.5%) WoW for the first time since the first week of October. Historic seasonality suggests flights tend to increase toward Christmas (Chart 1).
This article is only available to Macro Hive subscribers. Sign-up to receive world-class macro analysis with a daily curated newsletter, podcast, original content from award-winning researchers, cross market strategy, equity insights, trade ideas, crypto flow frameworks, academic paper summaries, explanation and analysis of market-moving events, community investor chat room, and more.
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 21 November:
Time to Fly Home for Christmas?
Global departures have increased (+1.5%) WoW for the first time since the first week of October. Historic seasonality suggests flights tend to increase toward Christmas (Chart 1).
Flights By Region
Asia
Searches for flights to China have soared since China eased domestic zero-Covid restrictions. Several cities cancelled or suspended mass PCR testing, and Covid-19 curbs on domestic group trips have been relaxed.
However, surging Covid-19 cases and new testing requirements (for Beijing as of 22 November) have followed the easing. Departures have continued to diverge (Beijing: -8.2% WoW; Shanghai: +8.6% WoW; Chart 4).
Elsewhere in Asia, departures keep grinding higher (+1.0% WoW).
Europe
Europe is lagging: departures have fallen 10.9% since the beginning of October (-0.5% WoW).Fartherafield, Eurocontrol predict European air traffic will not recover until 2025. In comparison, departures from the US have moderated 0.8% over the same period (+2.0% WoW).
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.