Ready for take-off: Canadian passengers are queuing up to fly into the holiday season

Air traffic decreased to its lowest point in April 2020, with the number of passengers flying Canadian Level 1 air carriers declining 97% year over year following the closure of borders and the introduction of travel restrictions in late March to curb the spread of COVID-19.

However, as travel restrictions were slowly lifted throughout 2021, air travel in Canada recovered rapidly.

Major Canadian airlines carried 6.0 million passengers on scheduled and charter services in September 2022, about double the number of passengers carried in September 2021 and 86.6% of the level in September 2019, before the COVID-19 pandemic.

In 2022, more and more Canadians are taking to the skies, and for many, air travel brings family together over the holiday season.

Although last-minute delays, cancelled flights and airport congestion can quickly turn into the nightmare before Christmas, major bottlenecks should be minimal in Canadian airports.

As of October 1, passengers were no longer required to undergo random testing on arrival.

Moreover, some of the new hires—baggage handlers and security screeners, for example—had completed their training, helping to ease resource constraints.

Airport queues are often inevitable during the holiday season, so to all of our Canadian travellers bearing the chaos, we wish you safe and pleasant travels, wherever you may be going.

With traffic at 16.5 billion passenger-kilometres and capacity at 19.8 billion available seat-kilometres, the passenger load factor was 83.4% in September, essentially the same as the 83.6% recorded in September 2019, before the pandemic.

Each passenger travelled an average of 2,758 kilometres in September, down 2.2% from September 2019.

At 157,000, the number of flying hours in September was 84.4% of the pre-pandemic level.

Overall, the 24 largest Canadian air carriers transported 17.0 million passengers in the second quarter of 2022, with 16.6 million on scheduled flights and 386,000 on chartered flights.

The number of passengers on domestic routes was 9.3 million, while there were 7.7 million passengers on international flights: 3.6 million flying transborder (flights between Canada and the United States) and 4.2 million on other international routes.

More information on the impact of early COVID-19 restrictions on civil aviation in Canada and internationally, from a data perspective, can be found here.

Further data and analysis of civil aviation in Canada for the second quarter of 2022 are available here.

Visit this page for the most up-to-date available information from all of the Aviation Statistics Centre's surveys, including  releases on principal statistics for Canada's major air carriers, airport data, fare basis statistics, and traffic data for Canada's most important markets.