Median daily operating hours of connected ground support equipment in Italy fell 4.24% in the first six months of 2026 compared with the same period of 2025, according to an analysis by telematics provider Targa Telematics.

The figure comes from equipment connected through the company's technology: passenger stairs and buses, baggage carts, loading and unloading equipment, tractors and ground power units. Because that hardware works only when aircraft and passengers are being handled, its utilization serves as a bottom-up proxy for airport activity — one measured at the asset rather than inferred from schedules or passenger counts.

The half-year average conceals sharp monthly swings. Italian GSE operating hours rose 0.9% in January and 2% in February, then declined 1.5% in March and dropped 6.7% in April. Activity stabilized in May and recovered 1.5% in June against June 2025.

Targa Telematics cautions that year-over-year comparisons were distorted by calendar effects, including the timing of Easter and Italian public holidays. Even so, the April figure stands out. The contraction was not confined to Italy: across the company's European dataset, GSE operating hours fell approximately 4% in April versus April 2025.

Country-level divergences were far wider than the aggregate. Germany recorded a 6.8% decline in median equipment operating hours, a result influenced in part by national strikes. France posted a 22.49% decrease — a figure large enough to suggest structural disruption rather than calendar noise, and one that European network planners will need to reconcile with their own ramp and turnaround records for the month.

Targa Telematics reads the results as evidence of gradual normalization of airport activity following the rapid post-pandemic recovery. That interpretation carries operational weight for ground handlers and airport operators. The 2022–2024 rebound pushed GSE fleets hard, drove maintenance intervals shorter and made dispatch reliability of ground hardware a gating factor on turnaround performance. A flattening or declining utilization curve eases that pressure, but it also signals that the volume-driven margin recovery many handlers budgeted for is fading — and that further productivity gains must come from asset efficiency rather than traffic growth.

The dataset behind the analysis is substantial. Targa Telematics manages data from more than 4.5 million connected assets across multiple industries and supplies digital fleet management technology for airport GSE and service vehicles. In a sector where handling contracts are increasingly tendered on measurable turnaround performance, telematics-derived operating hours give both airports and airlines an auditable basis for verifying that contracted ground capacity matches actual demand.

For fleet planners, the immediate question is whether the April trough marks a one-off — strike- and holiday-driven — or the front edge of a softer demand environment. The May stabilization and the June uptick of 1.5% lean toward the first explanation, but a single month of recovery against a weak comparator does not establish a trend. The second-half data, covering the peak summer season when GSE utilization typically maxes out, should show whether European ground activity has genuinely plateaued at post-recovery levels.