AI Analysis: Aircraft movements, by civil and military movements, airports with NAV CANADA services and other selected airports, monthly

Executive Summary

This Statistics Canada dataset (Table 23100297) tracks monthly aircraft movements across 127 Canadian airports from January 2022 to December 2025, revealing a heavily skewed distribution where a small number of major hubs dominate national traffic. Civil movements vastly outpace military activity, with clear seasonal peaks each summer and a wide gap between the busiest and quietest airports. The data provides a comprehensive four-year picture of Canadian aviation activity at both the national and individual airport level.

Key Findings

• The dataset covers 42,672 records across 127 airports and 889 unique time series, spanning 48 months from January 2022 to December 2025.
• Aircraft movements are highly right-skewed: the mean of 4,005 movements is more than 16 times the median of 250, indicating that a handful of major hubs like Toronto and Vancouver drive the national totals.
• Total civil movements is the dominant category, averaging 10,938 movements per period and reaching a maximum of 607,152, while military movements average just 136 — less than 1.5% of civil activity.
• 50% of all airport-month records fall between just 22 and 1,308 movements (IQR), confirming that most Canadian airports operate at relatively low traffic volumes compared to major hubs.
• Seasonal patterns are clearly visible in the trend data, with aircraft movements consistently peaking in summer months and declining in winter across the full four-year period.
• The top 10 airports account for a disproportionate share of national traffic, with a large gap separating them from the bottom 10 airports, which record only minimal average monthly movements.
• Outlier detection identified specific months with anomalous movement counts outside IQR-based bounds, while the coefficient of variation analysis flagged the top 10 most volatile airports — likely reflecting seasonal tourism, regional events, or operational disruptions.