Charts

These charts show the size and rhythm of the market itself: how many people fly, how quickly that is changing, when in the year they go and how full the planes are. They also compare airport security counts with official passenger counts. The two agree closely, mainly because both count the same passengers, so the close fit is not a sign of forecasting skill.

These charts show how long aircraft stay in US airline fleets, how maintenance cost rises as a fleet ages and how much fuel each new generation of aircraft saves. An aircraft counts as having left a fleet when US airlines stop reporting it, so a sale abroad counts as well as scrapping.

These charts compare unit costs, unit revenues and the gap between them across low-cost and legacy carriers.

These charts show what a ticket costs and how the price changes with distance, with competition on the route and with how restricted the fare is. They also show how the number of routes, and the traffic on each, changes with distance. Longer flights cost more in total but far less per mile. The charts describe how that pattern varies and do not establish what causes it.

Traffic is not spread evenly across airports or routes. These charts show how airports divide into large, medium and small hubs, the many small airports that each carry little traffic, and how the recorded route network has changed over three decades. Part of that change comes from which airlines report their flights, not from where aircraft fly.

Air traffic has dropped repeatedly and recovered at very different speeds. Some markets are still short of their pre-COVID level, among them transpacific travel and Canadian domestic travel. These charts measure each shock: how deep the fall was, how long the recovery took and what did not return.

Across markets, air travel tracks income closely, and these charts carry the formal evidence and its limits. The models have income in them and no ticket prices, so their figures also count the fall in real fares that came with rising incomes. Charts that set other measures beside traffic, such as household budgets and income per person, sit here too. They report associations, not settled effects.

These charts track air freight, mostly in the United States: how much moves, how it divides between all-cargo airlines and airlines that also carry passengers, and how it moves with the wider economy. Some of the national US series count freight on all-cargo flights only, so freight in passenger holds is outside them. The charts that compare airlines count each airline's whole freight.

Outside Singapore, each market's passengers are projected from income and population growth alone. New routes, cheaper fares and network effects are left out, so read each as an income-only projection, not a full forecast. Singapore, a hub, follows a time trend with no income term.