Avion Express flew 51,377 cycles on behalf of other airlines in 2025. Chart every relationship and an uncomfortable-looking truth appears: two partners account for almost nine-tenths of the flying.
ACMI — aircraft, crew, maintenance, insurance — is aviation's invisible workforce. A wet-lease operator's jets fly in other airlines' colours, on other airlines' routes, sold under other airlines' codes. The passenger never knows. Which makes the business hard to see — unless you chart the relationships themselves.
The chart counts cycles — one takeoff and one landing — rather than hours or revenue, because cycles are what ACMI capacity fundamentally sells: departures an airline couldn't otherwise crew or cover. 51,377 cycles in a year is roughly 140 departures a day flown for someone else.
Of those cycles, Viva (Mexico) took 29,168 — 56.8% — and Eurowings took 16,421 — 32.0%. Together: 88.7% of the entire operation, flying for just two customers. The remaining 21 partners share the last tenth, from SunExpress at 1,032 cycles down to a two-cycle engagement with Corendon Europe. The long tail isn't noise, though — it's the sales pipeline. This year's four-cycle trial is next summer's base contract.
You can read the concentration two ways. As risk: lose one anchor client and half the business needs a new home by next season. As strategy: deep, multi-base partnerships beat shallow ones, and the Mexico–Europe pairing is deliberate — Mexican demand peaks in the European winter, so the same fleet earns in both hemispheres' high seasons. The truth, as usual in ACMI, is both at once.
A bar chart would rank these partners; a chord diagram shows them as relationships — every ribbon connects the operator's arc to a partner's arc, and the ribbon's width is the cycle count. That makes the 89% concentration something you feel: two ribbons fill the circle. Hover any partner to isolate its share, with the exact percentage computed in the centre. And because a 2-cycle partner is 14,000× smaller than the largest, the small arcs get labels on demand rather than illegible permanent ones.
One row per relationship — the two parties and the volume between them.
| operator | partner | cycles |
|---|---|---|
| Avion Express | Wizz Air | 4,820 |
| Avion Express | easyJet | 3,110 |
Novice tip: one row per pair is all it takes — the agent arranges the arcs and ribbons and sizes them to the volumes. You don't need to build a full matrix; the pairs you actually have are enough.
ACMI is a business of few, deep relationships with a constantly auditioning long tail. One diagram makes the whole model legible: who the anchors are, how asymmetric the book is, and where next year's growth is quietly boarding. If your business runs on a small number of large relationships — suppliers, clients, routes — this is what your year actually looks like.
Curious how partner or customer concentration looks in your own data? Drop it into the Nomogram Lab agent for three proposals, browse the portfolio, or read how to choose the right chart.