Q4 jet cracks rally as flight numbers jump, US air travel hits 15-mth high
Quantum Commodity Intelligence - Demand for jet fuel continued to rise in Europe last week with flight numbers up more than 11.5% over the week, data from Eurocontrol showed Monday.
While summertime cracks for jet cargoes arriving in north-west Europe have changed little over the past week amid the improving flight numbers, fourth quarter refining margins have rallied amid the recovery.
Cracks for August jet cargo were pegged around $5.30/b Friday, about the same as Monday, September cracks were up around $0.25/b, and fourth quarter cracks were up around $0.50/b between Monday and Friday, Quantum data shows.
The weekly flight count reached 146,892 flights over the week to July 4, in 41 countries, ranging from Iceland to Morocco, Turkey and the Ukraine, up 15,398 flights from a week earlier.
Flight numbers have almost doubled since early June, and the gap to 2019 levels has risen from 56% below in early June to around 40% by last Sunday.
Just over the last week, the two year ago comparison has improved around 8 percentage points.
But European skies would still have needed to see around 101,000 more flights last week to match the same tally in 2019.
The number of passengers going through Department for Transport checkpoints at US airports hit its highest level since the start of the pandemic during the Fourth of July holiday weekend, data showed Monday.
Independence Day
Meanwhile, in the US the air travel recovery continued as the seven-day average of passengers rose above the key 2 million threshold on 30 June and stayed there until 4 July, when it fell to 1.96 million.
A total of 2.196 million passengers went through checkpoints on 1 July, more than the corresponding day in 2019 and the highest since 5 March 2020.
On average, traffic remained 17% below 2019 levels between 30 June-4 July, an indication that the closure of international borders and fears of virus contamination are still having an impact.
Nevertheless, the latest figures show a remarkable recovery from the trough of just 90,000 passengers per day hit during the pandemic's darkest days in April 2020.
At the start of 2021, before the Covid-19 vaccines were widely administered, there were still only about 900,000 passengers per day.
More than 47.7 million Americans were expected to travel between July 1 and July 5, the second-highest volume on record, according to a report from the American Automobile Association published last Friday.
A total of 157 million people, equivalent to 48% of the population, were fully vaccinated at the time of writing.
