Quarterly RPK for Leading Airlines in China Q1 2019 to Q4 2023

Credit: Airbus

Recently reported traffic performance for the leading Chinese carriers shows a strong performance for the last quarter of 2023, vastly superior to the previous two years and slightly below the same quarter of 2019 for all three operators.

Air China’s RPK annual traffic comes to only 6% under 2019, while the 128 millions passengers it carried in 2023 accounts as 12% above its 2019 performance. Air China is the only of the three featured airlines to have achieved a performance superior to 2019 for that metric.

Scheduled ASK figures from ASM reveals a 33% increase for flights originating from China for the first quarter of 2024 against the same period of 2023.

Antoine Fafard

Antoine works as an analyst with the Aviation Week Network, focusing on commercial fleets and MRO.