Flight Friday: Putting The Focus On Asia-Pacific's Operational Recovery, Utilization Trends

With Aviation Week’s MRO Asia-Pacific starting next week, this week’s #FlightFriday looks at indexed flight hours for Asia-Pacific, China and India.

Asia-Pacific operators have taken a long time to recover from the COVID-19 pandemic. Utilization has returned to just below 90%. With the extended travel restrictions of some countries within Asia-Pacific and China’s now-abandoned zero-COVID policy, it was difficult for these operators to fly intra-region.

After the initial outbreak of COVID-19, Chinese operators recovered quickly, even during 2020, due to their vast domestic network. However, the slow vaccine rollout, which was not as effective as other vaccines—and then rolling local and regional lockdowns—led to a sawtooth effect on China’s utilization. After abandoning the zero-COVID policy in December 2022, China has made large strides in returning utilization to 2019 levels and is almost 35% higher in August 2023 compared to 2019.  

Indian operators have seen some ups and downs in their utilization trends. The good news is that since April 2022, utilization has generally been at, or near, 2019 levels. India’s current utilization issues are caused by non-COVID factors. 

First is the durability issue of Pratt & Whitney’s PW1000 (GTF) engine. This issue, which affects engines operating in harsh environments worse than engines in non-harsh areas, has led to operators being unable to operate some flights due to a lack of available aircraft. This durability "excuse" has also been given as the reason for the demise of GoAir, marketed as GoFirst. Losing an operator with a large fleet really impacts the overall utilization. With Indian operators having a large outstanding orderbook, the utilization should continue to grow.

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