Source: Xinhua Author: 12/05/2009
Subject Concerned: Opinion Airlines
Leading U.S. airlines say they achieved healthier traffic results with more seats occupied in November, signaling that the worst of the air-travel slump might be over.
Dallas-based Southwest Airlines and Houston-based Continental Airlines led the six biggest U.S. airlines to their best traffic results in 18 months.
Southwest, which carries more passengers in the United States than any other airline, said on Dec. 4 that its November traffic, measured in revenue passenger miles, increased 11.7 percent to 5.88 billion from 5.26 billion in the same month last year, despite a 7.7 percent cut in its flying capacity.
United Airlines, a subsidiary of Chicago-based UAL Corp., registered a 1.8-percent increase in traffic for November.
Analysts said the positive performance of the U.S. carriers benefited from having all of the peak Thanksgiving holiday travel occur entirely in November this year.
In addition, an improving labor market in November indicated that the recession, which punched the air industry profoundly, might have ended.
Meanwhile, other statistical results were also stronger than the prior-year period, backing up rising optimism that the industry's pains were finally easing.
Southwest also reported that its load factor, a measurement of a plane's fullness, rose 13.3 percent to 76.5 percent from last year's 63.2 percent. All of the country's nine largest carriers, except for US Airways, reported higher seat occupancies in November from the same period in 2008.
Another factor that helped boost investor sentiment was that unit revenues, the average amount of revenue achieved by the airline per unit of capacity available for sale, started to return to levels before the 2009 dive.
Southwest said its passenger unit revenue was up 12 percent in November, compared with the same month last year. US Airways also acquired its best year-over-year performance since last December with its unit revenue down only 2 percent last month.
"The revenue environment continues to show core sequential improvement with strength in close-in bookings," US Airways president Scott Kirby said on Dec. 3.
Analyst Gary Chase from Barclays Capital noted that the results look even better when comparing changes from month to month rather than from the same month last year.
"Airline revenue recovery has marked the transition from expectation to reality, staging one of the best initial recoveries since the 1980s when viewed sequentially," Chase said.