With Aviation Week’s MRO Europe happening Oct. 17-19 in Amsterdam, we look at five large European operators, indexing their flight hours against their equivalent month in 2019.
Turkish Airlines (THY) have seen the largest increase in flight hours when compared to 2019. Turkish have done this by adding a large number of aircraft to their fleet, with almost 60 more aircraft in service in September 2023 vs September 2019. Turkish Airlines continues to grow as is still has almost 90 aircraft on Airbus and Boeing’s orderbooks. Turkish has almost become the de facto operator for people wanting to travel in/out of Russia as they have kept air routes open after most of the world severed ties after the outbreak of the war on Ukraine.
Air France and British Airways are both at 90%+ of 2019 levels as of September 2023. With international utilization still down on 2019 levels, countries with a smaller domestic footprint are impacted more, and with the UK having a poor domestic network, and the restrictions placed on Air France by the French government, these two airlines still have a little way to go.
Lufthansa and KLM are both in the mid 80% range. Lufthansa still has Airbus A380s they are slowly returning to service, and the airline is impacted by the Pratt & Whitney GTF issue as Lufthansa has GTF-powered NEOs in its fleet. KLM is also down, and with pressure being applied by the Dutch government on operations at Amsterdam Schiphol airport to cap flights to almost 10% below 2019 levels to reduce both noise and emissions, it may take KLM longer to recover to 2019 levels.
This data was put together using Aviation Week’s Tracked Aircraft Utilization tool.
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