55% of fleets grounded in the beginning of April.
59% of fleets grounded at the end of April.
57% of fleets grounded at the beginning May.
55% of fleets grounded the end of May.

So, our latest analysis shows the trend we noticed weeks ago seems to be true. The number of grounded aircraft is going down and markets are slowly picking up. We analysed the fleets advanced data and we see that 55% of fleets are now grounded worldwide.

This trend also supports the trend we see in airline scheduled capacities. Both analyses show the market is jumping up from the bottom, but we are very far from a pace toward steep recovery.

The number of grounded aircraft does not fully represent the full picture as many airlines reduce utilisation to a minimum to avoid storing aircraft. We expect in further months to see utilisation drops for aircraft (ch-aviation fleets advanced data also includes utilisation data).

We see Asia continuing its leadership in recovery. From 52% grounded in the beginning of April, 50% in the end of April, and 48% in the beginning of May, it has now recovered to 45% of the fleet grounded in the region.

Europe has 100 fewer aircraft grounded compared to two weeks ago. In North America, airlines grounded 70 more aircraft than two weeks ago.

The main driver of the growing number of active aircraft in Asia is the China market. We can now conclude that airlines in China never had the same high level of groundings as in other parts of the world. In February, we saw more than 29% of the fleet grounded by Chinese airlines, in the end of April this number stayed at 25%, and now we see only 19% of the fleet is still not active in China.

This week we also took ch-aviation ownership data to compare how large lessors are exposed differently to grounded aircraft. We looked at the portfolios of lessors that have more than 100 aircraft placed at the airlines and which are exposed most with grounded aircraft.

From the lessors with diverse portfolios we see Carlyle Aviation Partners has 83% of its fleets grounded, while another 10 leasing companies have 70% to 80% of its owned fleets on the ground. Unsurprisingly, three lessors with the lowest share of its fleets grounded are from Asia – CALC, ICBC Financial Leasing and Bocomm Leasing have 40% or fewer of their fleets grounded.

Looking at the absolute numbers, there are two lessors with more than 500 aircraft grounded – GECAS and AerCap. These two are also the largest lessors in the world by number of aircraft owned so it is also not surprising to see a high number of grounded aircraft attached to them.

We use ch-aviation fleets advanced data for this analysis. Our fleet team works to deliver the latest updates on airline commercial fleets globally.