IATA released the 2025 World Air Transport Statistics report in July 2026. Key findings on global fleet composition, busiest airport pairs, top passenger markets and premium-class travel — and how aviation professionals can access equivalent live data through the AirLabs API.
The International Air Transport Association released the 2025 edition of its World Air Transport Statistics (WATS) report on 16 July 2026, providing a comprehensive statistical view of the global aviation industry through the end of 2025. The report is one of the industry's most-referenced annual publications — cited by aviation media, consultancies, equity analysts and researchers as the authoritative baseline for global aviation metrics.
WATS covers a broad set of dimensions: passenger demand, airline supply, operational performance, global fleet composition, top routes, employment and financial performance. This year's report draws on data from 1,315 airlines in the IATA Annual Statistics collection, with more than 250 international carriers contributing specific data.
For aviation data consumers, the WATS report is a retrospective snapshot — a rigorously validated view of what happened across the industry in the previous year. Complementing this retrospective view with live operational data is where API access to fleet, route and airport data becomes essential. This guide summarises the key findings from the 2025 report and shows how to query equivalent live data through the AirLabs API for continuous monitoring, custom analysis and application development.
"The value of an annual industry report like WATS is depth and authority — a rigorously assembled baseline. Its limitation is the twelve-month time lag. Combining WATS with a real-time flight data API lets analysts anchor their models on validated statistics and refresh them continuously."
The 2025 report confirmed the narrowbody family's continued dominance of global commercial flight operations. Boeing 737 variants collectively operated approximately 10.8 million flights in 2025 — a 12 percent increase over 2024 — making the 737 family the most-flown aircraft type worldwide by a substantial margin. The Airbus A320 followed at roughly 8.7 million flights, with the A321 at 4.2 million.
The composition of the widebody fleet shifted noticeably compared to pre-pandemic 2019. Newer, more efficient types gained share: the Boeing 787 operated approximately 40 percent more flights than in 2019, and the Airbus A350 roughly doubled its 2019 flight count. In contrast, the Airbus A380 declined about a quarter, and the Airbus A319 narrowbody dropped by a third. The Airbus A220 posted the largest proportional growth in the reporting period, reflecting its rapid deployment on secondary regional and short-haul markets.
For applications that need to monitor these trends continuously rather than annually, the AirLabs Fleets Database accepts aircraft type codes as filter parameters:
GET https://airlabs.co/api/v9/fleets?icao=B738&api_key={KEY}
[{
"hex": "A9D286",
"reg_number": "N732AN",
"flag": "US",
"airline_iata": "AA",
"icao": "B738",
"iata": "738",
"model": "Boeing 737-800",
"manufacturer": "BOEING",
"engine": "jet",
"engine_count": "2",
"built": 2015,
"age": 11,
"msn": "31549"
}]Swapping the icao parameter for A320, A321, B789, A359, A388 or A220 returns the equivalent slice for each type. Aggregating in your application layer reproduces the fleet composition view for any operator, country or aircraft type. For a deeper treatment of these analytical patterns, see our Airline Fleet Data Guide and Aircraft Fleet Data by Country.
According to the 2025 WATS report, Asia Pacific accounts for nine of the top ten busiest airport pairs globally. The Jeju–Gimpo (CJU–GMP) domestic pair in South Korea remained the world's busiest, carrying approximately 13.3 million passengers between the two airports in 2025. Only one pair in the global top ten — Jeddah–Riyadh (JED–RUH) in Saudi Arabia — sits outside Asia Pacific, and every top-ten pair is a domestic connection.
Regional highlights from the report include:
For continuous monitoring of route networks and city-pair activity, the AirLabs Routes Database returns every airline connection between any two airports:
GET https://airlabs.co/api/v9/routes?dep_iata=CJU&arr_iata=GMP&api_key={KEY}Combined with the Schedules API for current departure activity and the Real-Time Flights API for live positions, this supports both structural route-network analysis and live operational monitoring. For a deep dive into network analysis patterns, see our Flight Route Database — Network Analysis guide.
The United States remained the world's largest passenger market in 2025 at approximately 890 million passengers, with growth of about 1.6 percent year-on-year — the slowest of the top ten markets. China ranked second at approximately 776 million passengers, growing 4.8 percent. The United Kingdom, Spain, Japan, India, Italy, Germany, France and Türkiye rounded out the top ten.
Several Central Asian markets recorded notably high growth rates. Kazakhstan surged approximately 40 percent to 18.1 million passengers; Uzbekistan grew nearly 17 percent to 12.5 million. Outside Central Asia, Vietnam's passenger volume grew nearly 15 percent to about 81 million.
Country-level analysis of live aviation data — active airlines, current fleets, operating airports — is available through country-code filters across the AirLabs API. To query the airlines currently operating from a specific country:
GET https://airlabs.co/api/v9/airlines?country_code=KZ&_fields=name,iata_code,total_aircrafts,average_fleet_age&api_key={KEY}The Airlines Database returns each carrier's fleet size and average fleet age, giving an immediate view of the operational footprint underlying passenger volume figures. Parallel queries by country code produce cross-country comparisons that align with the WATS market rankings. For the fleet-registration side of country-level analysis, see Aircraft Fleet Data by Country.
The 2025 report noted that international premium-class passengers — business and first — reached approximately 109.7 million in 2025, growing about 4.5 percent year-on-year. This represents roughly 5.5 percent of all international travelers.
Regional patterns highlighted in the report include Latin America's premium segment rising about 22 percent year-on-year, Europe remaining the largest absolute market at approximately 39.7 million premium passengers, and North America and the Middle East leading the world in premium share of total passengers at approximately 10.4 percent and 9.5 percent respectively.
The AirLabs API does not provide passenger-class segmentation directly — that is a cabin-configuration and booking-data question outside the scope of an operational flight data API. What it does provide, however, is the underlying network context: which carriers operate long-haul international routes, on which aircraft types, at what frequency. Combined with the WATS premium-class analysis, this operational context supports competitive positioning research, route economic analysis and network planning research.
The value of a report like WATS is depth, cross-carrier standardisation and authoritative validation. The value of a live operational data API is continuity — the ability to see the same metrics evolve throughout the year rather than waiting for the next annual publication.
For most analytical workflows, these are complements rather than substitutes. WATS provides the authoritative baseline for headline metrics; a live flight data API provides continuous refresh, application-integrable JSON and the granularity to drill down to specific carriers, airports or aircraft types on demand.
AirLabs data is not a replacement for WATS. Passenger volume, revenue passenger kilometres (RPK), available seat kilometres (ASK), load factors and financial performance metrics require airline data submissions of the kind IATA compiles for WATS. What AirLabs offers is complementary: real-time and reference data on the operational side — which aircraft are flying, which routes are active, which airports are handling which traffic — that supports the day-to-day work of aviation professionals in between annual publications.
Several professional workflows benefit from combining the annual WATS baseline with continuously updated operational data:
Consultants preparing market entry studies, capacity plans or fleet strategy assessments anchor their models on WATS-validated baselines for the previous year and then refresh with current operational data throughout the current year. Route network updates, fleet changes and airport activity trends all become visible through API queries that mirror the WATS categories.
Analysts covering airlines and aircraft manufacturers use WATS aircraft-type flight counts as a benchmark, then track quarter-over-quarter deltas through AirLabs Fleets Database queries. Growth in specific aircraft variants — A321, A350, A220 among others — can be monitored continuously rather than annually.
Trade publications and specialist aviation media routinely produce data-driven coverage of route changes, fleet updates, market movements and airport activity. The WATS release provides seasonal news coverage; the AirLabs API supports the specific, current data points that populate month-to-month reporting between the annual publications.
Airports and airport marketing teams use WATS busiest-pair figures to benchmark against peers and identify gap markets. The AirLabs Schedules API and Routes Database support the continuous monitoring of new route launches, frequency changes and competitive activity at the airport level.
Leasing companies tracking their portfolios across the market use WATS aircraft-type usage counts to size the addressable market for each variant and to inform placement strategies. The AirLabs Fleets Database allows continuous monitoring of type-specific fleet composition across operators and countries.
Universities and think tanks studying air transport economics, transport-policy impact and network evolution use WATS as an authoritative annual dataset alongside live operational data. Cross-referencing structured research datasets with live API queries supports rigorous longitudinal analysis.
For applications that combine annual WATS baseline data with live operational monitoring, a few patterns work well in production:
icao=B738 for narrowbody analysis, airline_iata=AA for per-carrier drill-down, country_code=US for market-level analysis, flag=US for national fleet views._fields) to keep responses focused on the specific metrics your analysis needs, especially for large aggregations across countries or aircraft types.The 2025 WATS report reaffirms trends aviation professionals have been tracking through 2025: narrowbody dominance, Asia-Pacific route concentration, sustained premium-class demand, and rapid growth in specific emerging markets. For applications that need to track these trends continuously — not annually — the AirLabs API provides the operational data layer that complements the WATS statistical baseline.
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