AirTran Airways, a subsidiary of AirTran Holdings, Inc, today reported traffic for the month of May. The airline's load factor, 80.8 percent, represents a new all-time company record for the month of May.
For May, traffic grew by 8.4 percent to more than 1.67 billion revenue passenger miles (RPMs) and the airline enplaned over 2.1 million passengers, a 6.6 percent increase over May 2009. Year-to-date, the airline has enplaned 9.7 million passengers - a 4.3 percent increase over last year.
Passengers flown surged 6.6 percent to 2,135,006.
Year to date, AirTran’s traffic was up 7.8 percent, its load factor was up 1.5 points and the number of passengers flown grew 4.3 percent to 9,738,814.
Orlando-based AirTran Airways is a subsidiary of AirTran Holdings Inc. and the second largest carrier at Orlando International Airport.
JetBlue Airways also said on Tuesday that its May traffic rose 9.8 percent, more than twice as fast as the airline added capacity.
That meant its planes flew fuller, with occupancy rising 3.9 percentage points to 81.3 percent.
JetBlue said it flew 2.3 billion revenue-passenger miles in May, up from almost 2.1 billion during May 2009. A revenue-passenger mile is one paying passenger flown one mile; it's a key industry measure of traffic.
Capacity rose 4.5 percent to 2.83 billion available seat miles, from 2.71 billion a year earlier.
For the first five months of the year, traffic rose 7.4 percent to 11.13 billion revenue-passenger miles. Capacity rose 5.8 percent to 14.18 billion available seat miles. Load factor -- the industry term for occupancy -- rose 1.2 percentage points to 78.5 percent.
