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

Traffic Graphs

It's gotten to the point where only three airlines (Endeavor, ExpressJet, PSA) hitting record post-crisis low daily numbers gets classified as good news in my mind... yikes.

That said, no airports hit new record low numbers yesterday, which has been unusual as of late, Kalitta hit a post-crisis high, and smart flight alert volume was relatively high the last few days as subscribers at some of the international hubs have been picking up visits from airlines and types that have been absent for a while.

The TSA screening numbers have been a popular indicator as of late too - while still down 96% year over year, yesterday TSA screened more than 110,000 people for the first time in almost three weeks.

We can't and won't know when we've bottomed out until after it happens - but if one's looking to grasp at straws, there are a few to grab in the recent data.

For the first time, I've assembled a graph with cumulative departures at the twenty busiest pre-crisis airports in the US and Canada; by this admittedly simplistic measure, perhaps we bottomed out Saturday, April 18?

If you'd like to unplug this evening, I'd encourage you to join us on Twitter as we watch Airplane! together. Ben Grannuci at NYC Aviation has details here.

News from Elsewhere

• Will empty middle seats help social distancing on planes? John Walton, BBC
• Icelandair Removing Seats on 767s for Cargo Flights, (h/t Bergdís Norðdahl)
• Kai-Chin Shih maintains a list of "Covid Combis"
• Pentagon plans to dispatch Blue Angles and Thunderbirds in coronavirus tribute; Dan Lamothe, Washington Post
• AvTalk Episode 83: Have we hit the bottom? Ian Petchenik, Jason Rabinowitz, Seth Miller, FlightRadar24
• DLD 288: Hoppity hopper; Stephan Segraves, Fozz Mahmoud, Rolando Veoso, Seth Miller; BoardingArea

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 Aviation News list with tweets from generally reliable sources
• 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

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.