Flight Friday: Narrowbodies Soar As Widebodies Decline In Latin America

As Aviation Week kicks off 2026 with its MRO Latin America event, Flight Friday highlights shifts in the region’s flight cycles seen in 2025, as compared to the benchmarks of 2019 and 2024.

The narrowbody (NB) sector in Latin America has grown in recent times. While 2019 ended with a little over 1,000 passenger narrowbodies, that number rose to over 1,200 by the end of 2024, and approached 1,300 by the end of 2025.

This 20% rise of the in-service fleet has helped shape the flights to grow by a similar amount when compared to 2019 levels. Since 2025 saw continued growth on top of 2024 of around 5% per month, this is a great indicator for operators in the region that demand is continuing to grow.

The story on the widebody (WB) side is a little different. Whereas the narrowbody fleet grew, the widebody fleet trended down, with an 11% reduction from almost 160 passenger aircraft at the end of 2019 down to 140 by the end of 2025.

This is also reflected in the data, with flights down 15-25% when compared to 2019. This shift indicates that passengers are traveling within the region more, or to nearby North America, and/or that non-Latin American operators are adding widebody flights to the region to move the passengers.

There is some hope for Latin American widebodies, in that for some months in 2025, utilization increased on the equivalent month in 2024, an encouraging sign. With LATAM, Azul and Aeromexico having over 20 widebody aircraft on order, the number of flights in the future has room to grow.

This data was put together using Aviation Week’s Tracked Aircraft Utilization database.