Analytic Flying Capacity Tracker: Updated June 2024
Australian International Airline Seat Capacity
Analytic Flying’s capacity tracking tools track monthly international seat capacity to Australia. The development of the dashboard was motivated by the uneven return of international airline traffic after the COVID-19 pandemic and lags in publication of official data. The dashboard uses publicly available data, supplementing official data with ADS-B flight tracking data and aircraft databases.
Capacity is measured by available seats provided by each airline on each city pair on a monthly basis. Inbound seats proxy capacity rather than combining inbound and outbound seats. While there is small variation between the two, they are close analogues. This reduces the volume of data, improving the efficiency of the database. Two dashboards highlight the aggregate data for all airports combined and a dynamic dashboard allows filtering by airline, origin and destination.
Methods and data
Historical data is sourced from the Bureau of Infrastructure and Transport Research Economics, better known as BITRE. These data with a delay of a few months but sometimes this delay has extended up to 6 months. In order to make the data as close to real time as possible, these data are supplemented with a purpose built database drawing data from ADS-B flight tracking data. Each flight is confirmed as having operated with a particular aircraft that is then cross referenced with data from planespotters.com to estimate the seat capacity on each aircraft. This occurs through a number of steps, firstly ADS-B data establishes that a flight operated on a particular day, then the aircraft that operated it, and then the individual aircraft’s capacity by cross referencing against the fleet list to establish the configuration, and even the exact configuration that applied at that time. This accounts for aircraft substitutions, varying aircraft configurations, flight cancellations, and other operational variations. However, these data are subject to occasional errors in the underlying databases.
Most recent data updates (9 July 2024):
Data current to June 2024 (BITRE to March 2024; ADS-B to June 2024); update includes new data for May to June 2024.
New airline: Turkish Airlines (March 2024)