The headline numbers suggest that global airline capacity has seen a slight recovery back to 61.9 million seats this week, a 1.2% increase. However, as the weekly airline capacity was being finalised further significant capacity cuts were yet to be supplied by many of the major Indian airlines and Fiji was about to enter a lockdown; the Fiji numbers are minor but India normally accounts for around 2.6 million seats so in truth global airline capacity is probably down week on week.
Hopes for that airline capacity bounce we are all hoping for and subsequent release of pent-up demand remain some way off. Airlines removed another one million seats for the remainder of April over the last week and worryingly some 13.3 million for May and 12.5 million for June; yes, that’s nearly 26 million seats dropped for the next two months. Airlines are clearly not expecting a recovery in the near future, or at least not as strong a recovery as originally hoped.
Chart 1 – Scheduled Airline…