One of the more incredible visual aspects of the coronavirus pandemic has been the reduction in activity illustrated on global flight maps. What would ordinarily be a crazy mismash of planes zipping around the world has been a much more sparsely populated picture in recent months, as people’s travel activities have been hugely curtailed by the lockdown procedures most governments have enacted to tackle the spread of the virus.
New research from Warwick Business School believe these maps could serve another purpose, however, and are also a good proxy for the overall health of the economy.
The researchers say that the aviation sector is crucial to the economy, and contributes approximately 3% of overall GDP in both the US and UK. Currently, however, statisticians typically rely on surveys of airline activity to gauge the scale of the industries contribution.
Flight data
The researchers crunched data from 25 billion aircraft location observations to provide real-time flight volumes for each airline, and from this, the contribution of the sector to GDP in both America and Britain.
“We trawled through the 25 billion messages to identify take-offs and landings by analyzing the altitude of aircraft over time,” the researchers say. “These data points provided the information we needed to reconstruct 67 million flights between July 2016 and December 2018.”
The flight trails allowed the team to generate monthly indicators for the precise flight volumes in each country, and for each airline. It’s a real-time dataset the researchers are confident can provide a valuable insight into the contribution the aviation sector makes to GDP. Not only is the data accurate, but it’s speed is a marked contrast to the surveys traditionally used, which can take up to three months to compile.
“We find evidence that rapidly available aircraft location data may be particularly helpful in improving estimates during economic crises,” the researchers say. “The crisis we are currently fighting has underlined how critical fast indicators are for good decision making.”
The data used by the team is broadcast live by aircraft to help them maintain safe passage across the skies, but it has only been a legal requirement since 2017 in Europe and early this year in the US, so is relatively unknown in terms of its importance for economics statistics.
“We have developed a model that can adapt to changes in the relationship between flight volume and GDP statistics over time,” the researchers conclude. “This will help us make maximum use of ADS-B data as the volume and quality of these measurements continues to grow.”
