What A Difference A Decade Makes
Wall Street Journal
By Scott McCartney
Most financial and statistical comparisons in the world of business are made with the same period 12 months before.
In the airline world, that means we compare this year's traffic and capacity to last year to see how the market is changing.
In looking over May traffic reports from airlines, I took a longer look. I selected a pair of airlines - UAL Corp.'s United and Southwest Airlines Co. - and looked back over 10 years.
I picked United and Southwest mainly because they are the poster children for the two major branches of the airline business: legacy airlines and low-cost carriers.
In the May traffic reports, I was struck by how profoundly United has shrunk this year: capacity was down 10.5% in the first five months of 2009. Traffic was down even more - a 12.1% decline.
That's extraordinary, and obviously something no company can sustain for a long time.
In the past decade, United has gone from the nation's largest airline to No. 3 in the U.S. It has endured a bankruptcy restructuring and several management changes.
And like many older airlines, it has seen lots of its domestic business go to low-cost carriers.
United's North American passenger traffic today, through the first five months of the year, is down 26% from where it was in the first five months of 1999.
The capacity change is even bigger: The available seat miles (a seat mile is one seat flown one mile) flown by United in North American through May this year were 38% lower than the same period of 1999.
That's a huge shrinking of the airline's domestic service. Passenger traffic isn't down as much as capacity because airlines have gotten much better at filling seats.
In the first five months of 1999, United's domestic load factor was 68.2%; this year it was 81.5% through May.
The past 10 years have been quite different at Southwest. The airline's passenger traffic skyrocketed by 845.3% when comparing 2009 with 1999.
Capacity increased by a similar amount - Southwest's load factor hasn't changed at all. It still fills about 72% of its seats.
Southwest flew 26.7 billion more revenue passenger miles in the first five months of 2009 than it did in 1999; United flew 8.1 billion fewer RPMs in North America over the same period.