LONDON – As per data from RadarBox.com, the number of total commercial flights is beginning to dwindle down ahead of the Winter 2022 season.
The Winter seasons typically aren’t as busy as the Summer seasons, as fewer people choose to go on holiday due to the weather of most countries around the world.
So with that in mind, let’s get into the numbers:
The Numbers…
For the seven-day rolling average between September 3-10, around 92,557 movements were recorded, which is an increase of 14.23% compared to the same period last year.
This figure is still around 18,000 shy of achieving pre-pandemic levels of traffic, but was heading in the right direction during the busy Summer months, as you will see below:
Take July 30-August 6, for example. This was the busiest period of the Summer 2022 season, with around 100,138 flights recorded, which was an increase of 24.65% compared to the same period last year.
Whilst this number was around 14,000 flights short of pre-pandemic levels, you can see that in the space of four weeks, the number has decreased by 8,000 flights.
With there being a global recession on the way, airlines are looking to save cash as quickly as possible, and this would involve the practice of canceling and removing flights from their network.
Case Study: British Airways…
Last month, British Airways announced that it would cancel 10,000 flights from the Winter 2022/23 schedule, despite over 120,000 flights still tuned to go ahead.
The 120,637 flights that will take place in Winter 2022 equates to an output of around 23.2 million seats. The Winter season begins on October 30th and runs through to March 25th next year.
Of this number, around 94,166 of these flights will be short-haul services that will take place within the UK and Europe, which is a substantial percentage.
This means that around 26,471 flights will be long-haul services either across the pond or further afield into Asia and beyond.
47,400 of the flights will depart from London Heathrow, with 6,550 from London City and 5,501 from London Gatwick.
Within this as well, Heathrow to Geneva is scheduled to be British Airways’ largest route, followed by other routes such as:
- Heathrow-Amsterdam
- Heathrow-Barcelona
- Heathrow-Edinburgh
- Heathrow-Berlin
The 10,000 flights that are due to be canceled means that approximately 1 million seats will be wiped off the capacity books.
Overall…
It remains clear that as we proceed into the Winter 2022/23 schedule, that we will no doubt see the rolling averages continue to descend. The question, of course, is whether this will go to new lows at all.
Looking ahead, it’s going to be interesting to see how much damage the aviation sector will take, on top of only just getting itself out of the COVID-19 pandemic as well.
Either way, it is very much going to be the case of “wait and see”, but with bankruptcies known to occur in the Winter seasons, we ask another question: Which carriers are going to succumb to the pressure?
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