JetBlue Airways Airbus A321LR
With the continued shift of operators using narrowbody aircraft where they once used widebody aircraft, this week’s Flight Friday looks at indexed cycles (flights) against the equivalent month in 2019 of passenger narrowbodies and how they have recovered to beyond pre-pandemic levels, in both the domestic and international markets.
Global utilization for domestic flying surpassed 2019 levels at the beginning of 2023. With domestic travel being deemed as “easier” after the pandemic outbreak, domestic travel faired comparatively well against international traffic. This helped the smaller aircraft—regional jets and turboprops—return to operations reasonably quickly, followed by the narrowbodies. The demand to use widebodies on domestic routes was simply not needed.
International passenger aircraft flights have yet to surpass 2019 levels when considering all aircraft classes, but the narrowbodies passed 2019 levels in February 2024. The industry, even before the pandemic, was beginning a moderate shift away from some routes that were traditionally seen as widebody routes. U.S. legacy carriers started to operate Boeing 757s across the Atlantic into some of the secondary cities. This transport model change has been exaggerated with the introduction of the Airbus A321neoLR and soon to be in-service XLR, with operators regularly utilizing these aircraft on their transatlantic routes. All of this has helped boost the narrowbody international flights beyond 2019 levels, and currently is almost 5% higher than the equivalent month in 2019.
The usual caveats can apply, as the narrowbody fleet has grown 11% between 2019 and 2024, helping to increase the number of flights compared to previous years.
This data was put together using Aviation Week’s Tracked Aircraft Utilization tool.
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