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

Changes in Airport Traffic Ranks

With the cargo airlines fully recovered from their cyclical weekend slumps, I thought it'd be interesting to compare traffic rankings among the airports in JetTip's smart flight alert coverage area in the US and Canada. The table below shows the top 50 airports based on the number of departures on Tuesday, April 7, 2020, EDT.

DFW, ORD, ATL, DEN, LAX, CLT, PHX remain in the top ten, and have been joined by MEM, SLC, and SEA which knocked out EWR, BOS, and IAH. SDF, ANC, and ONT also made strong gains rank-wise, buoyed by the stability of cargo.

Traffic Graphs

Notable trends in Tuesdays numbers include American and Spirit joining the rest of the industry with larger declines; it looks like Spirit's putting some big cuts in place today - will be interesting to see if they join the other low cost carriers and end up with cuts in the neighborhood of 90%. The other big outlier is Southwest, who's still operating about 50% of their flights.

TSA's numbers were sub-100,000, which interesting to fans of big round numbers; overall percentage drop remains steady at -95%.

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

News from Elsewhere

• The collapse of Ravn: How Alaska’s biggest rural air carrier met its end; Colleen Mondor, Anchorage Daily News
• Deeper cuts, reprotect options coming for JetBlue; Seth Miller, PaxEx.Aero
• Goodbye American 757/767, Officer Wayfinder
• The uncertain future for Boeing's twin 787 assembly lines in Washington and South Carolina; Jon Ostrower, The Air Current
• The COVID-19 shutdown is making weather prediction more difficult, Andrew Tarantola, Engadget
• Ethan Klapper's twitter thread on 757 vs A321 in the US

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.