This year we have expanded the depth of detail in our popular country by country air capacity statistics series. Every week Routesonline provides statistics highlighting airline and airport activity in an individual domestic market. We take a look at the last five year’s schedules as a snapshot and compare seat capacity, showing which airlines and airports are growing and which are constraining and identifying trends.

The data is all supplied by OAG Aviation using its OAG Schedules Analyser tool.

Scheduled Network Capacity in Chile

Scheduled Network Capacity in Chile by Airline

Chilean national carrier LAN Airlines, now part of he LATAM Group, is the dominant carrier in the country's domestic market through its LANexpress division despite its local capacity decling by 6.4 per cent in 2014 to 51.08 million seats following a record offering in 2013. However, LAN Airlines branded capacity has increased 5.9 per cent across the same period meaning its total share of domestic capacity has actually grown from 67.7 per cent in 2013 to 68.5 per cent in 2014.

Sky Airline is the main rival to LAN Airlines and continues to grow its domestic offering on a year-by-year basis. In 2014 it increased its capacity by 0.8 per cent compared to the previous year, boosting its overall capacity share by 1.2 percentage points from 30.1 per cent in 2013 to 31.3 per cent in 2014.

Competition in the domestic market in Chile is expected to increase through 2015 with a couple of new entrants anticipated in local skies. These include ChileJet which last December received the green light from local authorities to operate flights from Antofagasta and Santiago.

Scheduled Network Capacity in Chile by Airport

Santiago’s Comodoro Arturo Merino Benítez International Airport is the largest domestic facility in Chile with a 40.0 per cent share of total available capacity within the country in 2014 with a marginal 0.6 per cent decline in seats versus 2013. It is followed by Antofagasta’s Andrés Sabella Gálvez International Airport (11.5 per cent) and El Tepual International Airport in Puerto Montt (8.3 per cent).

Antofagasta’s Andrés Sabella Gálvez International Airport (up 0.2 per cent) and La Florida Airport in La Serena (up 1.0 per cent) were the only facilities among the country’s ten largest domestic airports to report capacity growth in 2014 versus 2013. Desierto de Atacama in Copiapó reported the largest capacity decline of 18.1 per cent as available domestic departure capacity fell from 510,094 seats in 2013 to 417,850 in 2014.

Scheduled Network Capacity in Chile by Aircraft Type

The chart below shows which aircraft types were most prevalent in Chile's domestic market. The schedule data shows the Airbus A320 Family dominates in this market, with the largest member, the A321, making its debut in Chilean skies in 2014. The A320 (320) is the most widely used aircraft type in the country with a 67.0 per cent share of available seats with its overall network capacity rising between 2013 and 2014 by 0.2 per cent from 8.56 million seats to 8.58 million seats.

The second most utilised aircraft type in Canada’s domestic market is the A319 (319) with a 31.0 per cent share, while third most widely operated by network capacity is the Boeing 767-300 widebody (763) with a 1.4 per cent share.

Alongside the debut of the A321, the biggest rise in annual capacity among the top ten aircraft types were recorded by the Airbus A319 (319) with a 21.2 per cent rise in available domestic seats in 2014 versus 2013. Aircraft types such as the Bombardier Canadair Regional Jet (CRJ), Boeing 737-200 /200C Advanced (73S) and Fokker 100 (100) previously used on domestic flights in Chile this decade where not used on scheduled services in 2014.

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