Flight Friday: European Recovery Varies By Type, Led By Narrowbodies

With the MRO community gathering in London for Aviation Week’s MRO Europe event, this week’s Flight Friday looks at how European flights (excluding Russian operators) are performing compared to equivalent month 2019, when broken down by aircraft class.

Overall, flights are up when compared to 2019 and have been since the start of 2025. However, when we look at each aircraft class in turn, not all recoveries are equal.

Narrowbody utilization is up almost 10% when compared to 2019. This number is helped with a slightly increased fleet size, 15% higher than 2019. The slight disparity is, in part, due to the Pratt & Whitney PW1000G (GTF) durability issues that are keeping some aircraft on the ground periodically.

The widebody class is tracking very close to the overall figure. Widebody utilization took a little longer to recover post-pandemic. However, European operators have been strong since the third quarter of 2024, and are currently 5% higher than 2019, again buoyed by a fleet that is 10% larger.

The narrative for the regional market is a slightly different story. The combined fleet is down over 15%, over 350 aircraft, which impacts aggregated utilization. The turboprops are at just over 90% of 2019 numbers, in part due to some high-profile airline failures; Flybe is a good example of a large regional operator that ceased operations between 2019 and today. The jets again are impacted in a large way, with operators favoring “upgauging” to larger aircraft and moving away from some of their legacy regional jet fleet.

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