AI Analysis: Domestic and international itinerant movements, by type of operation, at airports with NAV CANADA services and other selected airports, monthly

Executive Summary

This Statistics Canada dataset (Table 23100302) tracks 84 months of monthly itinerant aircraft movements across 129 Canadian airports from January 2019 to December 2025, encompassing over 152 million cumulative movements across 2,709 unique time series. The data is heavily right-skewed, with a handful of major hub airports driving the bulk of activity while most airports report very low volumes. The most defining event in the dataset is the COVID-19 pandemic, which caused a 75%+ collapse in movements from a July 2019 peak of 390,712 to an April 2020 low of 95,846, followed by a gradual multi-year recovery.

Key Findings

• The dataset spans 84 months (January 2019–December 2025) and contains 227,556 records across 129 airports, 3 movement types, and 7 operation types, totalling over 152 million cumulative itinerant movements.
• The distribution is heavily right-skewed, with a median of just 49 movements per record versus a mean of 1,420, and 75% of all records falling at or below 343 movements — confirming that a small number of major hubs dominate national traffic.
• Domestic movements are the largest category by far, with a mean of 1,933 and a maximum of 390,712, while transborder and other international movements have medians of only 7–8, indicating minimal international activity at most airports.
• The COVID-19 pandemic caused the single most dramatic anomaly in the dataset, with total movements collapsing from a peak of 390,712 in July 2019 to just 95,846 in April 2020 — a decline of more than 75% — before gradually recovering through 2022–2025.
• All operation types are very strongly correlated with one another (r = 0.967–1.000), indicating that movements across commercial, government civil, and military categories rise and fall together, driven by shared seasonal and economic forces.
• Air carrier Level I movements correlate perfectly (r = 1.000) with both government civil and government military movements, and account for the vast majority of total itinerant movements nationally (r = 0.967 with total movements).
• The IQR outlier method identified no isolated statistical outliers, as the pandemic's impact was so prolonged it shifted the entire distribution rather than appearing as discrete spikes, underscoring the systemic and sustained nature of the disruption.