We continue to monitor scheduled capacity from airlines around the world. The industry’s recovery continues to show signs of growth. The scheduled capacity is now at 54.3 million seats – a recovery of 5% per week since the beginning of May. Still, there is a long way to the full recovery of more than 100 million seats scheduled during the northern summer of 2019.

Europe is now in the driver’s seats to lead the world’s recovery.

We continue to monitor the data from the ch-aviation capacities module.

Asia, which was the first region to bring optimism to the industry, keeps bouncing up and down, but with a positive trend in the medium term. After a slight downturn last week, scheduled capacity jumped by 18% this week and now has 27.2 million seats’ capacity in the region. More than half of these seats (14.3 million) are scheduled in China’s domestic market, which also recorded the highest weekly number.

The second-largest region in the industry also continues the growth: airlines in North America now have 13.5 million seats scheduled to the depart in the current week. This is more than double from the lowest point – we saw less than 6 million seats scheduled in the middle of May. 10.9 million seats are scheduled in the domestic U.S. market.

Europe continues to lead industry growth. Again, airlines added more than 1 million seats to the market in the week, and for the first time after covid-19 started spreading, scheduled capacity jumped over the 10 million mark. The industry now has more than quadrupled compared to the lowest point at the end of April, when only 2.5 million seats were scheduled to depart European airports.

South America is still not gaining momentum. The number of scheduled seats remains below 1 million seats in this region – more than five times less than what it was in the middle of March. The number of international connectivity in South America remains at extremely low levels with less than 100,000 seats scheduled to depart airports in the region.

Africa continues a very slow-paced recovery – for the first time it jumped over 1 million scheduled seats mark. Interestingly, “Binter Canaries” is the airline now operating the largest number of seats in Africa (due to relatively large intra-Canaries operation). Domestic markets in mainland Africa are relatively small and the international travel limitations still do not allow the industry to take-off for faster recovery.

The recovery in Oceania stopped during the last week. Mainly driven by domestic markets (646,000 seats out of 735,000 total seats) the region’s capacity was growing constantly, but now that growth has frozen, possibly due to new travel limitations introduced in Australia. Australia is by far the largest market in the region with more than 50% capacity share currently.

We will continue to monitor the situation on capacities and will post on our blog. Follow us here and follow our #chaviationcovid19updates on Linkedin.