Flight Friday: Utilization Since 2019 And The Dawn Of New Benchmarks

Entering a New Year allows us to reflect on the years that went before us.

Therefore, this week’s Flight Friday looks back at annual utilization split out by aircraft class (narrowbody, widebody, regional jets, and regional turboprops) from 2019 to 2024.

Total flight cycles in 2024 exceeded 2019, with 4% more cycles in 2024 than 2019. However, the makeup of the change is not consistent across all aircraft classes.

The “winners” are the regional turboprops, which were up 15% more than 2019 levels, and the industry important narrowbodies, which were up 8% over 2019. The narrowbody class was particularly helped by the rise in in-service fleet, which is up more than 8%. The regional turboprops’ tracked cycles grew despite a small reduction in in-service fleet numbers.

The widebody recovery is not quite back to 2019 levels and is off a little over 3%, even with a slightly larger in-service fleet number. At the bottom of the pile is the regional jet “recovery.”

The number of annual cycles is down 15% compared to 2019. This has been caused by a lowering of the in-service fleet, down almost 8%, and caused by a shift by some operators in the U.S., mainly Delta Air Lines, to move flying from their feeder network and into mainline operations.

With only Embraer and Comac delivering new regional jets, and an uptick in retirements, perhaps these new levels are about as good as the class is going to get.

While 2024 was not without its challenges—of which there are probably too many to mention—in most cases, 2024 utilization has set some new benchmarks to stop the industry from having to use 2019. Here’s to 2025 setting a new benchmark across all sectors and segments.

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