55% of fleets grounded in the beginning of April.
59% of fleets grounded at the end of April.
57% of fleets grounded at the beginning May.
55% of fleets grounded the end of May.
54% of fleets grounded in the beginning of June.

We continue to see the path to recovery, even at a slow pace. We analysed the fleets advanced data and we now see 54% of fleets are grounded worldwide. That’s 1 percentage-point less than the analysis we did two weeks ago.

This trend also confirms what we see in airlines’ scheduled capacities. We saw during the last two weeks that airlines re-activated 1,117 aircraft – almost 80 aircraft per day on average.

The number of aircraft grounded does not fully represent the full picture as many airlines reduce utilisation to a minimum to avoid storing aircraft.

More than half of re-activated aircraft have returned to the skies in Asia. Airlines took 583 aircraft back from storage or maintenance, representing a 3% improvement. Asia remains the leading region in this recovery. From 52% of the groundings in the beginning of April, 50% at the end of April, 48% in the beginning of May, and 45% at the end of May, now it’s recovered to 42% of the fleets grounded in the region.

North America and Europe tried to catch up with the recovery trend. Both regions returned more aircraft to the service in last two weeks: North America has 276 fewer units in storage than two weeks ago while Europe saw 158 fewer aircraft on the ground.

This week we also looked more closely at the percentage of groundings by country. Here are the TOP10 countries around the world with the highest percentage of active aircraft. We excluded countries with less than 10 aircraft registered in the country.

We see large markets like China, Japan and Vietnam being in this TOP10 list — these countries are helping Asia be one of the most active regions these days.

We also looked at the TOP10 countries with the highest percentage of grounded fleets by airline. We see the recovery levels vary in different countries. All TOP10 countries with the highest number of aircraft grounded have less than 20% of aircraft in the skies (while leading markets now have less than 20% of aircraft left grounded).

We see Austria “leading” this list negatively with only 10 aircraft being active from 297 aircraft total registered in the country. This may be explained by the TOP3 largest carriers in the country (easyJet Europe, Austrian and LAUDA) are not operating as of the date of this analysis. Positively, all three are planning return to service in June, so the future is strongly optimistic.

We use ch-aviation fleets advanced data for this analysis. Our fleet team works to deliver the latest updates on airline commercial fleets globally.