U.S. business aviation traffic is up 11% so far in March compared to a year ago, following a 5% decline in January and February, according to WingX Advance data.

Global business jet activity is down just 2% for the month to date.

Business aviation accounts for 19% of all fixed wing activity so far in 2021, compared to 12% for the same period in 2020, WingX says.

In the U.S., recovery is spurred by demand driven by 12 states that are unlocking travel restrictions.

Half of the 15,000 sectors flown from those states in March, for example, have been out of Texas, with demand rebounding after the “big freeze” weather event in February.

Activity in Europe is improving in March after a 26% drop in January and February. But in the UK, flights are down 50%.

“Business aviation in the U.S. is remarkably buoyant, with clear growth on the prepandemic in 2020,” said Richard Koe, WingX Advance managing director. “Florida joined by a host of other unlocked states in seeing a sharp rebound in travel demand. Activity in Europe is getting closer to normal, with trends also starting to reflect comparison with the slowdown prelockdown in March 2020. In Asia, especially in China, flight activity is already reflecting the recovery from the lockdown in progress a year ago.”

There was a healthy spike in volume over the past week due to President's Day weekend. As you'll see from the chart below the trend is up for the past two weeks relative to what we have seen as a trend... only down 11% where the trend has been 15-17%. The week-over-week increase for the President's day holiday was within 0.12% of the increase last year.

Early indications suggest that inventory has since shrunk even further, to just 1,776 jets on January 11, 2021 or just 7.9% of the fleet.
Pre-owned pricing today is generally in alignment with expectations on both sides of the transactions table compared to May 2009 when for-sale jets peaked near 19% of the in-service fleet, the highest ever recorded.
At 8% in January 2021, inventory as a percentage of the in-service fleet is now at its lowest recorded level to date in this millennium.

Although business jet flights were off YoY from -11% in Light up to -27% in Large most of the reduction in usage was in first half of 2020. Since then flights have recovered almost to normal with the exception of Large aircraft.

It is no surprise Large aircraft remain slow due to the continued pressures and difficulties with International Travel.

• Charter P135 activity has mostly recovered to about 85% of pre-Covid-19 levels, but Business Private Part 91 flying remains stubbornly flat and down 30-40% from 2019 levels with the greatest decline in larger, longer range jets.
• Much of this difference between Private Part 91 flying and Part 135 Charter could be attributed to new entrants into the private flying world that started chartering aircraft more or for the first time in 2020 due to Covid-19.
• It is also becoming apparent that many Private flyers opted to purchase their own aircraft as well as represented in the declining available inventories numbers.

JETNET’s proprietary monitor of sentiment amongst aircraft owners / operators rebounded smartly in Q4 2020 across most regions of the world, based on JETNET iQ quarterly surveys.