Ranked by combined flights across the first halves of 2024, 2025 and 2026, the wet-lease market's ten busiest customers tell two stories at once: an untouchable leader, and two brands of the same airline group heading in opposite directions at speed.
ACMI — wet-leasing, where one airline flies aircraft, crew, maintenance and insurance on another's behalf — is where carriers quietly buy and shed capacity. Rank the busiest customers by the flights they had operated on their behalf, and you get a leaderboard that doubles as a map of who is expanding and who is retreating.
Scandinavia's SAS sits at the top with 91,509 flights across the three periods — and unlike almost everyone below it, it's still growing: up another 19% into 2026. Swiss holds a steady second on 64,518. The gap between first and second is the widest on the board, and it's getting wider. In a market where most customers are volatile, the leader's stability is itself the story.
Look at rank three and rank nine together. Qantas mainline was a fixture near the top — then its 2026 ACMI flying fell off a cliff, down 87% to just 2,660 flights. Read that alone and you'd conclude the group pulled back hard from wet-leasing.
But drop to rank nine and there's QantasLink — the group's regional brand — up 780% to 18,951 flights, having barely registered in the data a year earlier. Add the two together and the Qantas Group's combined ACMI flying went 19,107 → 22,080 → 21,611: essentially flat, even as its two brands swung violently in opposite directions. Why? The flight counts alone don't say — contracts, operators and routes sit outside this dataset, so we won't pretend otherwise. What the data does show is a contrast that vanishes if you track a single brand and only appears when you hold the whole group in view.
The rest of the top ten is turbulence. IndiGo and KLM both roughly halved their 2026 wet-lease flying (−56% each). Viva of Mexico appeared from nowhere in 2025, then gave most of it back. SpiceJet swung the other way, up 126%. EAT Leipzig — DHL's cargo workhorse — is the quiet metronome, barely moving across three years. Wet-lease demand is where airlines make their fastest capacity decisions, and it shows.
The customers were selected on one metric — combined flights across the three half-years — so the chart makes that metric the bar itself: length is the ranking, sorted top to bottom. Each bar is split by year and shaded oldest-to-newest, which is why Qantas reads as a bar of mostly "old" flying with a bright sliver of 2026, and QantasLink as almost entirely brand-new. A momentum figure beside each rank carries the latest move. Every number is computed from the underlying data; nothing is typed in by hand.
One row per entity, then one value column for each period you're comparing — two or three periods works best.
| customer | h1_2024 | h1_2025 | h1_2026 |
|---|---|---|---|
| SAS | 29,300 | 32,100 | 34,841 |
| QantasLink | 2,160 | 10,400 | 18,951 |
Novice tip: don't rank the rows yourself or add a totals column — the agent sorts by the combined total and computes each entity's momentum. Just give it the raw counts per period.
Have a ranked dataset with a story moving underneath the totals? Drop it into the AK.VIZ agent for three chart proposals on your real numbers, or see more of the work.