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

Air Canada 777-300ER Freighters

Air Canada

Air Canada announced they'll be removing the seats from a trio of their 777-300ER aircraft to increase their cargo capacity. This work was being done at YMX, and one aircraft, C-FIVX, is already in service. It looks like the remaining two aircraft will probably be C-FITW and C-FNNU (which have been at YMX for a few weeks), though C-FNNQ is also a possibility - it just arrived there a couple of days ago. They'll show up under the "Cargo" filter on JetTip smart flight alert boards until they go back to their pax configuration.

C-FIVX flew its first flight in the new configuration yesterday as ACA7153, YYZ-NRT.

Traffic Graphs

Yesterday was the slowest post-crisis day for several airlines and airports, with Alaska, Republic, Spirit, Mesa, Piedmont, and Horizon and airports CLT, DTW, JFK, LAS, LAX, MIA, and PHX posting their lowest numbers.

TSA's numbers remain at lowest percentage (-96%) since the crisis started.

Methodology notes can be found at the bottom of this post.

News from Elsewhere

• Lighter aircraft are flying higher; Ethan Klapper
  
• An-225 has begun COVID-19 relief flights; Antonov
• Battleships, Blackbirds and Tough Times at the Airport; Jen Niffer, Tales from the Terminal

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.

So, here are some graphs and an airline by airline breakdown in the decrease in traffic from US and Canadian airlines over the last month. 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.