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.
51% of fleets grounded in the end of June.
46% of fleets grounded in the beginning of July

We continue to see a path to recovery. One month ago 54% of airline fleets were grounded, but now this number stands at 46%. That’s less than half of fleets on the ground for storage or maintenance.

This trend also confirms what we see in airlines’ scheduled capacities. We saw during the last month airlines re-activated more than 2,500 aircraft – more than 80 aircraft per day on average.

We expect to see even more aircraft being reactivated in July when many airlines resume flying.

If in May we saw the most aircraft re-activations in Asia, in June Europe took the crown: airlines took more than 1,000 aircraft back to the skies from storage or maintenance, representing an improvement of 13 percentage points. Still, more than half of the fleets in Europe remain grounded: airlines still have more than 3,500 aircraft in storage.

Asia kept the lead in the smallest percentage of groundings. From 52% in the beginning of April, 50% at the end of April, 48% in the beginning of May, 45% at the end of May, and 42% in the beginning of June, now it’s recovered to 37% of the fleets grounded in the region. Airlines took 589 aircraft back to the active operation in Asia during the last month – we saw similar levels of re-activation two weeks ago when we looked at these numbers in the beginning of June.

North America is trying to catch up with recovery too, with 778 aircraft reactivated during the last 4 weeks. Now just 40% of the aircraft are non-active among North American airlines.

Smaller regions are behaving differently: While Oceania has just 45% of its fleets grounded, the regions of South America and Africa remain negative leaders, with almost two-thirds of the fleet on the ground.

We also looked at the TOP10 countries with the highest percentage of active fleets. We excluded countries with less than 10 active aircraft and we see now 4 countries operating with more than 80% of active fleets: Seychelles, New Caledonia, Viet Nam and China. A month ago, only Seychelles and China reached this milestone.

We can also see the 2 European countries made TOP10: Hungary and Luxembourg. Hungary’s high performance can be explained by one of the leading ultra-low-cost airlines activities throughout Europe. In Luxembourg, almost half of the aircraft registered there are freighters which have way more activity worldwide compared to passenger aircraft.

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. Still, we no longer see any country with single digits of active aircraft.

We see Panama “leading” this list negatively with only 13 aircraft being active among 125 aircraft total registered in the country. This may be explained by the decision of the leading carrier of the country, “COPA Airlines,” to suspend operations until August 7.

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