The number of commercial flights in the European Union totalled 653,072 in September 2025, a 2.6% increase on the previous year, according to new data from Eurostat.
This figure is 1.8% lower than the total flight count for the corresponding month in 2019, prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, however.
Similar trends were seen during the summer months of June to August, with commercial flight numbers 2.8% higher in June, 2.9% higher in July, and 3.3% higher in August compared to the corresponding month a year earlier.
However, in each case, commercial flights were lower than that of the corresponding months in 2019 – June was down 2.1%, July was down 1.7%, and August was 0.3% lower, underscoring the aviation sector’s slow return to growth since the pandemic.
Flights compared to September 2019
On a country-by-country basis, some 12 EU countries exceeded their 2019 flight counts in September 2025, with Cyprus (+24.1%), Poland (+22.4%), and Greece (+21.4%) reporting the strongest increases.
At the same time, however, commercial flight counts in Latvia (-29.8%), Sweden (-27.3%), and Finland (-23.9%) were well below their pre-pandemic equivalents, an indication of the uneven level of recovery across the EU.
The data, sourced from Eurocontrol, covers scheduled and non-scheduled commercial flights—including passenger, freight, and mail services. Read more here.
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