May 11th - The busiest day of the year for the number of available airline seats revealed

Friday 12 August will be the busiest day of the year for the number of available airline seats, a leading analyst has predicted.

John Grant, chief analyst at OAG, calculates that 16.1 million seats are on offer worldwide for that date at present. The exact number is likely to change as airlines adjust schedules, with an overall picture of 0.6 per cent of capacity removed every week. The busiest day for aviation before the coronavirus pandemic was also the second Friday in August: 9 August 2019, with the data analyst Cirium calculating 17 million passengers took off worldwide.

The actual number of airline travellers on 12 August 2022 will be well down on that figure, because around one in five seats is likely to be empty – giving a figure of about 13 million passengers.

In 2021, says Mr Grant, “the busiest day was a very unusual 17 December”. The last-but-one Friday before Christmas had 12.5 million seats on offer, with around nine million passengers.

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