21 April: US & Canada COVID-19 Aviation Traffic Report

Traffic Graphs

Traffic made a modest recovery on Monday after most (nearly all) passenger airlines and airports had their slowest days since the crisis started over the weekend. On Monday mainline passenger flight counts were down 79% compared to recent average pre-crisis Mondays.

Southwest continues their comparatively modest decrease, though they're still operating a relatively large number of flights.

It'll be interesting to see what happens with the smaller airlines, as the DOT has largely denied their requests for exemptions - Spirit will need to start operating more flights if they want bailout money.

News from Elsewhere

• Antonov's An-124 and An-225 to US; Chritopher Miller, Buzzfeed
• United Airlines SEC Filing
• IL76 Navigator Glass Nose View, SXM

• A Closer Look at Delta’s May Schedule; Brett Snyder, Cranky Flier

• DOT grants exemptions to Delta, Alaska Airlines, Hawaiian Airlines under CARES Act obligations; Seth Miller, PaxEx.aero
• Flying Across the Country On an Empty Airplane (Guest Trip Report); Andrew, Cranky Flier
  
• Inflight social distancing will kill short-haul LCC travel: IATA; Seth Miller, PaxEx.aero
• Titan Airways Airbus A318 landing at St Helena Airport; What The Saints Did Next, YouTube
• America's 'big three' airlines are preparing for a very painful fall; Justin Bachman & Mary Schlangenstein, Bloomberg
• Eastern Airlines Unveils New Livery

Additional Aviation News Resources

If you're looking to keep tabs on what's going on, there are lots of great places to be keeping track of aviation news.

• JetTip's realtime diversion tracking page
• Coronavirus Flight Cancelation Tracker
• TSA Sreening Volume
• The Air Current
• PaxEx.Aero
• Cranky Flier's Daily Update
• Ethan Klapper's Bluer Skies
• JetTip's Aviation News list with tweets from generally reliable sources

Methodology: Departures by Airline Since Late February

COVID-19 started impacting aviation in China at the end of January, which also impacted the US and Canadian routes to Asia, but large differences in the number of flights being operated by carriers on this side of the Pacific didn't really start adding up until a couple of weeks ago. A few places had been sharing global trends, but I was selfishly interested in an airline by airline breakdown of how significant the impact had been.

The methodology here is to count all flights between 12:00:00 AM and 11:59:59 PM eastern time that departed from an airport in the airline's respective home country (Delta departures from US airports, WestJet departures from Canadian airports, etc.). Since commercial airline schedules are highly cyclical, the percent change is derived by comparing the specified day's count compared to the average of the number of flights each airline operated during three previous "pre-crisis" weeks, 22 February - 13 March.

Nick Benson

Nick lives in Burnsville, Minnesota with his wife and three children. He grooves on railroad and aviation photography, politics, geography, weather, and LEGO. He started JetTip's smart flight alert service in 2017, and is now a full-time avgeek. He can frequently be found atop a step ladder at MSP's Aircraft Viewing Area.