ch-aviation offers you a very user friendly interface targeted at consumers, professionals and enthusiasts alike to search and analyse airline capacities. We have answered the most frequently asked questions below and hope this will address any immediate questions you may have on our capacity section of the site:
How do I use the capacity search form?
You have to provide at least one search criteria as an input to be able to search but can combine any of the search criteria as you would like. If you are looking for capacity data for the Los Angeles – Auckland route for a certain period of time enter either “Los Angeles” or “LAX” in the Airport field under Origin, “Auckland” or “AKL” in the Airport field under Destination and choose your period of time in the fields “From Date” “To Date”. Then click on the search button.
How up to date is the ch-aviation capacity data?
ch-aviation has partnered with OAG Aviation Worldwide Limited, one of the leading airline schedule data providers to be able to offer this service for you. We receive weekly schedule data for the vast majority of all scheduled passenger airlines and also some charter and cargo carriers and then combine it with our own ch-aviation fleet data to calculate the actual ch-aviation capacity data. While ch-aviation is undertaking a large amount of effort to correct and improve the data quality received from airlines by applying a wide range of data integrity checks, we still rely on what is initially filed and provided by the airlines and cannot guarantee that the capacity data is 100% accurate at any given time.
Which origin and destination search criteria can I use?
You can either search by continent, specific airport, state or country:
- To search by airport, either type in the IATA (three letter) code, i.e. LHR for London’s Heathrow airport, the ICAO (four letter) code, i.e. LSZH for Zurich or just start typing the airport name into the search fields. We will automatically populate a list of options for you to choose from a dropdown list as you enter the city or airport name.
- Alternatively start by selecting a continent from the origin or destination dropdown list first. You may then choose to drilldown further and to either select country or a state (i.e. Alabama for the United States of America) or a metro group (i.e. London for all airports in the British capital and not just Heathrow).
- Combinations are possible, you may want to search for all flights from Santiago de Chile to Argentina for example.
What is a metro group?
A metro group includes multiple airports in the same city or close to the same city. If you are flying to New York, it might be reasonable for you to consider a flight into “JFK” (New York John F. Kennedy International) but to fly back from EWR (Newark Liberty International) because of flight times, your plans for the visit, air fare or similar. Both airports serve the city of New York and along with La Guardia airport even closer to the city centre are therefore in the metro group for New York City (metro group code NYC). By the way, we have made it easier for you to find alternative airports for a trip as well. Just click on any airport throughout the site and we will show you airports close by that might be of interest.
What filters can I apply for my search?
You may either filter by airline, alliance, aircraft type or service type:
- Either type in the airline’s name or IATA two letter carrier code (i.e. SQ for Singapore Airlines). As you start typing in an airline name, we will recommend possible options for you in a dropdown list that will dynamically be made available.
- You can select one of the big three airline alliances (oneworld, Skyteam or Star Alliance) from the Alliance dropdown list.
- The Aircraft Type filter allows you to filter by a specific aircraft type, i.e. A380-800.
- Using the Service Type filter you can look at specific types of flights (see below).
- Selecting the flight type you can look at specific types like international or domestic flights.
What is a service type?
IATA (the International Air Transport Association) has defined various different Service Types describing the nature of a specific flight. As a consumer, most likely the vast majority of all flights you are taking in a lifetime will have service type J (which stands for Normal Service; essentially that applies to any scheduled passenger flights). You can filter for specific flights, i.e. if you would like to look for cargo services operated by Lufthansa Cargo, enter “LH” as the airline code and select the Service Type “Cargo”).
How do I use the settings on the right?
By default, ch-aviation will display you the capacity on all cabins sorted by airline and origin for the next week of the current date. If you would like to modify this display you can choose between Capacity, Frequency and Available Seat Kilometers. You can also sort your results by other parameters like Airline, Destination; Airline Route; Airline; Route; Origin and Destination.
You can also select another period of time by editing the “From Date” and “To Date” fields.
I am working for an airline and our capacity is not displayed on ch-aviation or is out of date, how can we provide you with our data?
ch-aviation has partnered with OAG Aviation Worldwide Limited, one of the leading airline schedule data providers to be able to offer this service to our customers. Please contact us at feedback@ch-aviation.ch and we can assist you in providing us with as regular as possible schedule updates and can process schedules in a variety of formats (SSIM7 files, SSM/ASM messages, Excel templates etc.) in cooperation with OAG