This article should take 2 minutes to read.

April 2020 was when we saw this biggest drop in the aviation industry, which is confirmed by The United States Department of Transportation, which released the statistics about April’s operations. This month was where we saw the lowest number of operated flights since 1994. The DOT reported that only 194,390 domestic flights were lower than the 583,000 flights in March with only. The previous lowest amount was in February 1994, which saw 370,027 flights. Even the on-time arrival percentage took a puzzling tumble since you don’t have as many people on the flight, the percentage dropped to 55.7% which is the lowest it has ever been since the reporting began in 1987.

Here is a lovely little table to help compare how many airports airlines operated at in April 2019 and April 2020:

I know you would be wondering this does include flights operated by Envoy, Skywest, etc. But these show that there wasn’t too much of a drastic change in airport operations, but the cancellation rate was up around 41.3% which was the highest beating September 2001 which had 20.2%. Travellers were also not happy with airlines during this time either.

The Airlines were receiving a record number of complaints during this time as well, especially when you compare them with April 2019 the number increased by 1,546.4% with around 19,856 total complaints. Seventeen thousand three hundred eighty-seven of those complaints were in regards to refunds with you guessed it, United Airlines receiving the most.

The question that needs to be asked is will we see these trends increasing as the situation progresses but airlines are now starting to operate their flights again with some even choosing to open new routes such as JetBlue beginning to operate flight England. But one thing for sure is that the crisis has potentially changed the way we travel now.