Tokyo Typhoon Exacerbates Declining Asia Departures

We track scheduled flights (what’s planned) and tracked flights (what took off) from a sample of the largest airports across the world.

Looking at data up to 19 September:

• Global departures have inched lower (-0.1%) WoW, continuing the decline from their summer peak, in line with historic seasonality (Chart 1).
• Asian departures collapsed over the past week (-4.2%), exacerbated by hundreds of cancellations in Tokyo (HAN: -9.9% WoW; NAR: -4.1% WoW) due to Typhoon Nanmadol. Elsewhere, departures from China continued to struggle (Shanghai: -8.8% WoW; Beijing: -3.0% WoW). However, there is promise: Chengdu is no longer under lockdown while the number of medium- and high-risk areas in China is plummeting (Chart A).

• Europe may be nearing the end of its year highs; departures fell -2.5% WoW (Chart 2). Indeed, cases are expected to pick-up through the winter – Germany has already reintroduced a mask mandate for long-distance trains. Meanwhile, the US (+1.1% WoW) was the only region to see an increase in the number of departures over the past week, though this is likely not the start of a trend higher with Autumn fast approaching.

Information on long-term movements in flight data is available below.

US

UK

Italy

Spain

Germany

France

Canada

China

Japan

Hong Kong

South Korea

Singapore

Thailand

Bilal Hafeez is the CEO and Head of Research at Macro Hive. He spent over twenty years doing research at big banks – JPMorgan, Deutsche Bank, and Nomura, where he had various “Global Head” roles and did FX, rates and cross-markets research.

Ben Ford is a Researcher at Macro Hive. Ben studied BSc Financial Mathematics at Cardiff University and MSc Finance at Cass Business School, his dissertations were on the tails of GARCH volatility models, and foreign exchange investment strategies during crises, respectively.

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