The data does not break out to discriminate between public and private sector openings. However, for correlation to Delta it probably does not matter. The government buys a lot of tickets and pays a lot for them. Government workers are these days more likely than not to be higher paid than private sector employees and most get much more generous leave and vacation.

Of course deficit spending hurts the US, but that's really another topic.

From the capacity numbers I've crunched, Delta and NWA have been lagging the us GDP growth by 7% to 10%. In other words during periods of 5% GDP growth, Delta was still shrinking by 5% and during a 5% GDP recession, NWA pulled down capacity something near 20%. It is likely the entire industry has been consolidating, but both NWA and DAL have been the "incredible shrinking airline" for a decade.

I based my employment quest on a belief that emergence from bankruptcy would change that trajectory. Unfortunately the numbers don't tell me much changed in the net result. An airline CEO once said, in this business you are either comfortably making mistakes, or scared to death and working with your hair on fire. He said the best results came when they were scared to death. Don't know about NWA, but at Delta it does not seem like there has been much calm between the storms for the last ten years.

When I have the time looking at the variance between DAL, NWA and the rest of the industry would be interesting. For one thing, the capacity levels between DAL and DCI were always divergent until the last two years. Now they move together.