Name: Aircraft movements, by class of operation, airports with NAV CANADA services and other selected airports, monthly
Creator: Statistics Canada
License: https://open.canada.ca/en/open-government-licence-canada

Aircraft movements, by class of operation, airports with NAV CANADA services and other selected airports, monthly — AI AnalysisThis 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 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.

Explore this analysis on Canada Data Explorer | Datastam