AI Analysis: Aircraft movements, by class of operation, airports with NAV CANADA services and other selected airports, monthly

Executive Summary

This Statistics Canada dataset (Table 23100296) tracks monthly aircraft movements across 129 Canadian airports from January 2019 to December 2025, revealing a heavily right-skewed distribution where a handful of major hubs dominate national traffic volumes. The most significant event in the dataset is the COVID-19 pandemic, which caused a ~78% collapse in total movements from a peak of 646,201 in July 2019 to a low of 143,075 in April 2020, with recovery still incomplete at 324,103 movements by December 2025. Across 54,180 records and 645 unique time series, itinerant movements consistently outpace local movements roughly 2-to-1, while military activity remains a marginal share of overall Canadian airspace usage.

Key Findings

• Total aircraft movements peaked at 646,201 in July 2019 before COVID-19 caused a catastrophic ~78% drop to 143,075 in April 2020 — the single largest anomaly in the dataset, flagged as more than 2 standard deviations below the long-term monthly mean of 440,284.
• By December 2025, monthly movements had only partially recovered to 324,103, remaining well below pre-pandemic highs despite sustained growth through 2021–2023.
• The dataset's mean of 5,903.5 movements is nearly 8x higher than the median of 765.0, confirming a heavily right-skewed distribution where a small number of large airports — such as Calgary International — drive aggregate totals.
• Itinerant movements (flights between airports) average 7,129 per month compared to 3,536 for local movements, making inter-airport traffic roughly twice as prevalent as local training or circuit activity.
• Military local movements are negligible relative to civil operations, averaging just 33 movements per month with a maximum of 962, compared to a civil category mean in the thousands.
• The middle 50% of all monthly airport records fall between just 126 and 2,444 movements (IQR of 2,318), confirming that the majority of Canada's 129 tracked airports handle modest traffic volumes.
• Year-over-year percentage changes exceeded ±20% during 2020–2022, with extreme negative swings in 2020 followed by anomalously large positive rebounds in 2021–2022 driven by the artificially low pandemic baseline.