With the holiday period being just around the corner, why not write a festive piece to show exactly how much air traffic expands during the days leading up to Christmas? Armed with a rich dataset provided by the digit gurus down in the Flightradar24 data vault, I set out for what I expected to be this year’s easiest assignment—to statistically prove how we’d seen a boost in flights ahead of Christmas last year. Surely this would be a walk in the park? No. As it turns out I was entirely wrong in my assumption.
In fact, the month of November last year turned out to be a busier time for scheduling departments than December. Contrary to my expectations, the vast majority of airports saw no huge influx of traffic during the holidays. Browsing through the digits returned by our brave data miners however did reveal one peculiar fact. While most airports showed remarkably stable traffic patterns, four suddenly saw a huge bump in activity during a very specific time window—December 27th and 28th.
The airports in question were Tarbes–Lourdes–Pyrénées Airport (LDE/LFBT), Salzburg Airport (SZG/LOWS), Innsbruck Airport (INN/LOWI) and Speyer Airport (QCS/EDRY).
But why? I decided to bring out my inner sleuth and set out to investigate!
A theory is forming
I reached out to my colleague Dragomir Kamov, a B2B Solution Architect at Flightradar24, to see if I had interpreted the data correctly. He agreed that the Historic Flight Utilization Data indeed suggested that these five airports reached very high z-scores in the final days of the year.
Now, if we allow ourselves a brief refresher of our maths lingo, this means that traffic at these airports deviated more from their normal levels than anywhere else in our dataset. And for our top four, what stood out was that the vast majority of that traffic increase occurred on two specific days.
Across much of Europe the days immediately after Christmas mark the single most concentrated travel period of the winter season. Christmas itself is typically spent at home, with December 24 through 26 reserved for family gatherings. Now, once those days pass, a large portion of holidaymakers head out all at once, particularly those bound for ski resorts. Many winter holidays are sold on fixed Saturday-to-Saturday or Sunday-to-Sunday schedules, which funnels enormous volumes of travel into a very narrow time window. This is obviously different to the summer travel season, which tends to spread out across multiple weeks.
Skiers: A force to be reckoned with
All four airports in our list turn out to serve regions closely tied to winter tourism, especially alpine and mountain destinations. Innsbruck (INN/LOWI) and Salzburg Airport (SZG/LOWS) are perhaps the clearest examples. Both sit at the heart of the Austrian Alps and act as gateways to some of Europe’s most popular ski areas. For much of the season, traffic remains relatively modest. Then, as we can see almost overnight, charter flights and business jets arrive en masse. Traffic then peaks every seven days, in line with the weekly package tour model mentioned earlier.
Tarbes–Lourdes–Pyrénées (LDE/LFBT) follows a similar pattern on the French side of the mountains. For most of the year, LFBT operates quietly. During peak ski travel days, however, it suddenly becomes a focal point for charter and private aviation heading into the Pyrenees. The contrast between ordinary days and peak days is stark, which is exactly what drives its statistical volatility.
But what about Speyer (QCS/EDRY)? I’ll be honest, I hadn’t even heard of this place before. Scouring approach plates and airport information available, I learned that it is mostly used by general aviation and business jets. And yes, access to various Alpine destinations turns out to be relatively close by as well.
Bingo, our theory holds up!
Small changes equals post-Christmas traffic spike
None of these airports are major hub airports. This fact actually helps explain the somewhat extreme fluctuation. When you have hundreds of daily movements on any given day, 20 or so more flights will not make a huge difference. For smaller regional and GA-heavy airports however, that increase in flights will appear as a significant deviation to a typical day of operations. So, when dozens of extra arrivals occur within a few hours—in this case charter flights and business jets—the percentage increase is enormous, even if the absolute numbers remain modest.
Case closed, mystery solved. I’m putting my detective cap back in my imaginary closet, along with the magnifying glass and pipe. Who knew that skiers wielded such power in the world of aviation?
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4 Responses
Nice and interesting Article but Straubing-Wallmühle‘s Airport Codes are RBM/EDMS and not EDRY (EDRY is the ICAO Code for Speyer Airport)
You are absolutely right Emil, the article has been corrected to reflect this. We meant Speyer, but for some reason wrote Straubing. Happy New Year!
What about Courchevel?
Do these places have ATC or do they put ATC in for busy periods?