Flight Friday: Asia-Pacific Recovery Proves Uneven Across Fleet Types
A twin-engine turboprop ATR 72-600 operated by Cebgo for Philippine airline Cebu Pacific on domestic flights, at Naga-Pili Airport.
As the industry gears up for Aviation Week’s upcoming MRO Asia-Pacific event in Singapore, this week’s Flight Friday looks at how operators in the region have finally returned to 2019 levels.
Overall, flights by Asia-Pacific operators returned to 2019 levels early in 2025. However, when we break down that utilization by aircraft class, not all recovery is equal.
Regional aircraft have been operating more flights per month since late 2022. Turboprops rebounded quickly post-pandemic and have continued to remain strong, with utilization generally around a third higher than the equivalent month in 2019.
With regional aircraft helping connect many parts of the Asia-Pacific region, especially more with remote airfields, it shows the importance of these aircraft for keeping people in the region moving. Although this is not evident in other parts of the world.
As strong as the regional aircraft have been, the narrowbody and widebody sectors remain below equivalent month 2019 levels. While both aircraft classes have grown, narrowbody aircraft are still around 5%, and the widebodies are almost 10%. The narrowbody in-service fleet count compares to 2019 levels, whereas the widebody fleet is currently a little lower than 2019 levels, which, in part, accounts for the drop in aggregated utilization.
Asia-Pacific was the last region to return to pre-COVID levels, but there is still a way to go for narrowbody and widebody aircraft.
This data was put together using Aviation Week’s Tracked Aircraft Utilization database.
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