The New Travel Document: Photograph of an Empty Plane

The dramatic falloff in air travel is captured in travelers’ photographs of their recent flights. The story of air travel’s shutdown can be told in numbers. Helane Becker, managing director and senior airline analyst at Cowen, an investment bank, estimates between 40 and 60 percent of United States domestic flights have been canceled. Cancellations of international flights are even higher, about 85 percent, she said.

But photographs will do just as well. Very few people are flying right now. But among those who are, many have found themselves on almost empty planes — and have captured that emptiness in photographs. Almost uniformly, they capture rows of vacant seats, a few heads poking above them, and vast acreage of overhead storage free for the taking.

Many such photos have been posted to Instagram and Twitter in recent days. Others were shared directly with The New York Times’s Travel desk. Lindsey Ferrentino, who flew home from Newark to Orlando, Fla. , on Saturday, bought three tickets for herself — one with points, and two for $17.

40 each — to ensure she’d have some space around her on the flight. When she boarded the plane, an Airbus A320 (capacity: about 150), it was almost entirely empty. So few people were gathered at the gate, Ms. Ferrentino said, that the attendants didn’t bother making any boarding announcements over the public address system.

“A guy just came out and said to the few people gathered, ‘OK, you can get on now. ’” Mats Edwards, a senior at Tufts University, took an empty plane shot on his Alaska Airlines flight home to Seattle from Boston’s Logan Airport on Monday afternoon. No one was lined up for security screening, so there was no need to practice social distancing. When it was time to board, the “Now boarding Group A” announcement yielded just one traveler, Mr.

Edwards said. He estimates there were about 20 passengers and four flight attendants on the Boeing 737-900, a plane that usually seats about 170 people. The passengers spread out around the plane, which pushed back from the gate at about 5 p.