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.
40% of fleets grounded at the end of July.

Airlines continue taking aircraft out of storage. At the lowest point in the crisis we saw 59% of fleets grounded – airlines sent 19,000 aircraft to storage or maintenance. Now airlines have 40% of aircraft in non-active mode, with 13,500 aircraft now in grounded fleets.

Aircraft re-activation intensified in July when more airlines resumed flying after full or part suspensions of operations.

Europe continues to lead the recovery as airlines re-activated another 1,000 aircraft in the first half of July. Europe now has 45% of fleets on the ground. While still less than the world’s average, the pace of re-activation is the biggest since June.

Asia and North America continue to lead the regions with the fewest groundings compared to other parts of the world. Airlines from both these regions have 35% of the fleets on the ground in the second half of July. Re-activations in Asia are now at a slower pace, as airlines brought back 238 aircraft during the last two weeks while North American carriers are now using 555 aircraft more than the previous period.

Smaller regions saw slight improvements during the last period, with airlines reactivating 63 aircraft in Africa, 38 aircraft in South America and 34 aircraft in Oceania.

We understand grounded fleets do not fully represent airline activity as airlines are able to variate between different utilization levels for specific aircraft.

We also looked at the TOP10 countries with the highest percentage of active fleets. We excluded countries with less than 10 active aircraft. We now see nine countries operating with more than 80% of active fleets: Hungary, Seychelles, Croatia, Luxembourg, China, the Netherlands, Viet Nam, Taiwan and New Zealand. A month and a half ago only Seychelles and China reached this milestone. Seychelles fell behind due to growth from Hungary’s largest registered airline, Wizz Air.

We also looked at the TOP10 countries with the highest percentage of grounded fleets by airline.

There is no big change in this list compared to two weeks ago. Panama and Venezuela continue to lead this list. Austria fell off this list when the largest airlines in the country resumed their operations. The leading carrier of Panama, “COPA Airlines,” is keeping its operations suspended due to government regulations

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