Flight Friday: Asia-Pacific’s Flights In 2025 Become The New Benchmark
As the global aerospace industry focuses on the 2026 edition of the Singapore Airshow, Flight Friday examines the Asia-Pacific region’s flight cycles in 2025, and how they compare compare to equivalent months in 2019 and 2024.
Asia-Pacific has been the last region to return to overall “pre-COVID” levels. However, not all recovery is equal.
Let’s start with the positive: when compared to the equivalent month of 2024, both the narrowbody and the widebody classes have grown.
Narrowbody is around 5% higher than 2024. For additional context, looking at the narrowbody in-service fleet, at the end of 2025 it is approximately 6% larger than at the end of 2024, helping add to a higher number of flights. Widebody is up approximately 2.5% compared to 2024. Again, this is assisted by an in-service widebody fleet that is 35 more aircraft than at the end of 2024.
Yet it’s not all positive. When compared to 2019, the narrowbody is still down 4-5%, even with an in-service fleet that is 3% higher than 2019, signifying that more aircraft, in this case, does not equal more flights.
The widebody numbers are lower still, with a 10% drop compared to 2019, but that can be attributed to the fact that the in-service fleet is 100 aircraft less.
For analysis purposes, 2025 seems to have become the new benchmark for Asia-Pacific utilization, and we may be able to stop talking about 2019 as the baseline.
This data was compiled using Aviation Week’s Tracked Aircraft Utilization database.
Related Content
