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

Traffic Graphs

I was going to skip putting this together today, but too many airlines and airports hit new post-crisis lows. The numbers from Frontier, Allegiant, and Sun Country, the three smallest low cost leisure airlines, really jumped out - on an average pre-crisis Wednesday they would have had 608 domestic departures; yesterday had 29.

Southwest hit a new daily low, with 1,450 domestic departures, down 61% from average pre-crisis Wednesdays. Endeavor, ExpressJet, Frontier, GoJet, JetBlue, Mesa, and Sun Country also set new record lows.

With many airlines hitting new lows, so too are airports; yesterday new minimums were set at ATL, DTW, FLL, IAH, LAS, MCO, and ORD. See yesterday's post to see how traffic rankings have changed.

As always, methodology notes can be found below, if you're interested.

News from Elsewhere

To keep up with the latest headlines, follow @JetTipNet on Twitter, and check out our Twitter list of generally reliable aviation reporters.

• Lufthansa "temporarily" decommissions A340-600 fleet
• Coronavirus compounds Boeing’s crisis, pointing to sharp job cuts and slashed production; Dominic Gates, Seattle Times
• Death of the Airline Industry Delayed; Brett Snyder, Cranky Flier
• United will cut 90% of May's capacity
  
• South Africa cuts off funding line to state-owned airline; Antony Sguazzin, Bloomberg

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.