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US Airline Traffic Rises in June

Published Jul 28, 2010 on Pilot Jobs

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US Airline companies have reported their June 2010 traffic results. Airlines traffic, measured in billions of revenue passenger miles, increased from an improvement in the global economy, improved business travel, international traffic and rising fares. Airlines are increasing their capacity in order to restore profitability and posted higher unit revenue growth for the month of June.

Airliner

The low-cost carrier Southwest Airlines recorded an increase in June traffic of 5%, the largest increase relative to its peers performance, on a capacity (or, available seat miles) increase of 1.9% year over year. Load factor (percentage of seats filled with passengers) was 81.9%, up 240 basis points (bps) year over year.

Southwest saw a 24% increase in unit revenue, measured by passenger revenue per available seat mile (PRASM), a key performance measurement for airlines. Revenue passenger miles (RPM) increased to 7.1 billion compared with 6.7 billion in the year-ago period. RPM is the revenue generated for every mile a passenger flies.

Delta Air Lines, the world’s largest airline, reported a traffic increase of 4.2% year over year in June based on a 1.5% capacity increase and 87.7% load factor, which indicates an improvement of 220 bps from the year-earlier quarter. The company flew 18.53 billion RPM in June 2010 compared with 17.78 billion in the year-ago period.

Delta’s domestic traffic rose 1.2% year over year based on a 0.6% capacity increase and load factor of 87.7%, which was up 60 bps year over year. Similarly, international traffic increased 8.8% year over year on a 2.9% increase in capacity, and the load factor rose 480 bps to 87.8%.

June traffic for American Airlines, a wholly-owned subsidiary of AMR Corporation, rose 3.2% year over year to 11.25 billion RPM and the capacity increased 1.3% year over year. Domestic traffic inched up 1.2% on a 0.6% rise in capacity and international traffic went up 6.6% on a capacity increase of 2.4%.

US Airways Group Inc said that its traffic increased 2.9% with strong growth in Latin America compensating for lesser growth in domestic traffic. The company flew 5.79 billion RPM versus 5.63 billion in the year-ago period. Mainline capacity inched up 2.8% and load factor was slightly up by 10 bps year over year at a record 86.9% for June.

Continental Airlines Inc traffic rose 4.7% year over year and load factor shot up 210 bps year over year.>

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