Back in the middle of February this year, we looked at the groundings of aircraft by Chinese airlines. Our data team updates information every day and, as of February 12, 2020, we found that 1,215 aircraft operated by airlines from China, Hong Kong and Macao had been grounded.
The latest analysis of ch-aviation fleets advanced data shows the number of active aircraft in this group of countries started to increase again from the beginning of March.
But if we look at the split of countries, then China shows an even higher rate of recovery of active aircraft while the number of active aircraft in Hong Kong still goes down.
We will continue to monitor the aircraft activity further and we plan to release an update after a week.
At the same time, ch-aviation capacities data shows the growth of China domestic traffic.
Chinese airlines schedule to grow the number of seats in the domestic market by 50% during the next 7 weeks. Airlines had 8,4 million seats scheduled for the week from March 9th to 15th and currently have scheduled 12,7 million scheudled for the week April 20 to 26th.
We continue to monitor capacity shifts in China and we see the airlines reduced the number of seats scheduled for the current and the next weeks compared to capacity they had scheduled week before. But optimism is growing for a stronger recovery at the begining of April.
On 13th of March, we have covered in the ch-aviation PRO newsfeed that the Civil Aviation of China (CAAC) announced new support measures to aid the aviation industry affected by the ongoing COVID-19 epidemic. A total of 16 new measures include a reduction of fees at the airports, direct financial support, optimisation of licencing and schedule approval processes and others. Earlier in March, CAAC also announced subsidies for routes to stimulate demand in conjunction with the Ministry of Finance.
We follow 52 airlines operating domestic flights in China (41 of them operates passenger flights). The 10 largest airlines have about 70% of total scheduled capacity with China Southern Airlines, China Eastern Airlines and Air China having a double-digit percentage of market share.
| Airline | Number of aircraft delivered |
|---|---|
| Ryanair | 4 |
| Aeroméxico | 3 |
| Malta Air | 2 |
| Singapore Airlines | 2 |
| Alaska Airlines | 1 |
| Caribbean Airlines | 1 |
| Copa Airlines | 1 |
| DHL Air | 1 |
| Flyr (Norway) | 1 |
| GOL Linhas Aéreas Inteligentes | 1 |
| Icelandair | 1 |
| Korean Air | 1 |
| Lynx Air | 1 |
| Unassigned | 1 |
| UPS Airlines | 1 |
We used ch-aviation fleets advanced and ch-aviation capacities data for this analysis.
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