The global airline demand scenario is presently significantly disrupted as a consequence of the Covid-19 health pandemic. Many airlines are storing aircraft but the daily dynamic of this change is increasingly challenging to research as many aircraft can be stored for short periods or indefinitely. Cirium are reacting as quickly as possible to these events and we are reassigning resource where appropriate to react to the situation, which should mitigate much of any impact.
Our standard approach to ‘storing’ aircraft is to do so after 2 weeks continuous inactivity and this is reflected in our messaging on product already. We will continue to use this benchmark as every airline will manage their fleets differently, some spreading utilisation across fleets and some using just a selection of aircraft. This means our data will remain fluid and some aircraft may be shown as stored before returning to service within 2 weeks, at which point we will remove the stored status period entirely. Meantime, many airlines are announcing their stored fleet quantities, but there may be some lag in our empirical data when compared to these comments. However, given that our stored data is derived from our flight tracking data, which reflects actual flights flown on a daily and near real-time basis, we are confident that our stored fleet detail reflects the actual situation as closely as possible, albeit with some short lag around parking and returning aircraft to operation.
