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

Traffic Graphs

After some positive trends with traffic numbers last week, we saw more post-crisis lows over the weekend. On Saturday (which is typically the slowest day of the week), American, Delta, Endeavor, GoJet, Horizion, PSA, Southwest hit new low numbers, as did ATL, EWR, CLT, IAH, LAS, SEA, SFO, and YYZ. On the other hand, TSA passenger screening numbers have been up the last few days, with levels above 110,000 for the third day in a row on Saturday, with year over year declines up a couple of percent to -94% after being down to -96% for a while - grasping at straws, yes, but it's something.

Cargo continues to do well generally - UPS and FedEx were up ~15% on Saturday; FedEx continued their big surge for Sundays, up 27%. ABX and NAC have some really weird low numbers for Sunday - not sure what's going on there.

News from Elsewhere

• Boeing Terminates Agreement to Establish Joint Ventures with Embraer
• Sam Mintz's thread on Airport CARES Act funding
• JetBlue plans new route network for CARES Act compliance; Seth Miller, PaxEx.aero
• Spirit Airlines running triangle routes to meet CARES Act requirements; Seth Miller, PaxEx.aero
• Time and money, not gimmicks, are going to get people flying again; Jon Ostrower, The Air Current
• Visual Approach's new Conversations video podcast
• Do it for science; Ethan Klapper, Bluer Skies

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.