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I am looking for historical data on the number of commercial passenger aircraft in service, ideally with additional information on the associated airline.

My search so far has turned up one scientific publication (from Finnair maintenance) that provides data on the total number of aircraft, by type of aircraft:

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Source: Kilpi, Jani. "Fleet composition of commercial jet aircraft 1952–2005: Developments in uniformity and scale." Journal of Air Transport Management 13.2 (2007): 81-89.

The data seems to have been sourced from the "ACAS" database, which was offered at the time by FlightGlobal:

ACAS is the leading aircraft database for Windows PCs. ACAS covers Western-built fixed-wing civil aircraft from 8 seats to ultralarge airliners. Also covers business jets and military transports. Click for a demo.

FlightGlobal has since spun out its data offering to Cirium, which offer data access at a hefty price tag. Whether their current offer also includes historical fleet fleet data going back to 1960 (or earlier) is not clear.

I found two other publications that might potentially be useful:

  1. The well-known "JP Airline Fleets International" publication - seems to be available only in print, historical data would likely need to be extracted from a large number of editions.
  2. The Air-Britain "Airline Fleets 2023" - again only in print.

ICAO and IATA have their own commercial data services, but those are (like the services of Cirium) rather expensive.

If there is any publicly available data, I would appreciate a hint on where to find it!

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Wikipedia has information for at least some airlines. I can't vouch for accuracy (which is probably not consistent, this being wikipedia after all).

Major question is how you'd consolidate the data into something useful. What are you going to do with airline mergers, splits, joint ventures, etc. etc.

For example KLM is fully owned by Air France, but fully owns Transavia and Martinair, as well as KLM Cityhopper. KLM USED TO have a joint venture with Northwest airlines for their transatlantic operations, how do you figure out which aircraft from each airline were committed to that and how to split them into the inventories of the partners? KLM owns (or owned) a percentage of Kenya Airlines, does that mean they in your numbers would own a percentage of their fleet?

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I've successfully obtained this information from two sources:

Annual financial reports from the airlines. Aircraft are a major capital asset, they report how many they have each year. I was able to download what I needed from the airline's website.

Hobbiest airplane spotter records. These records were amazingly accurate.

In the case of Southwest airlines, the financial reports provided 1/year numbers of each kind of aircraft.

The airplane spotter records I found included a spreadsheet of every tail number, date it joined the fleet, date it left the fleet, etc. I.e. 1/day resolution on the company's fleet.

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After some more investigation, I was able to find authoritative information - unfortunately, for US airlines only (and only for those that were members of the former Air Transport Association of America (ATA)):

The Past A4A Annual Reports (1937-2011) includes information both on total aircraft in service and on the respective types:

enter image description here

Source: 1964 ATA Annual Report: "50th Anniversary of Scheduled Air Transportation"

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