AirTran, jetBlue and Southwest lead US airline demand growth in September

This week AirTran unveiled a new logojet in honour of the Atlanta Falcons football team. “There’s no better way to celebrate our partnership than to launch the best looking airplane in the sky,” said Tad Hutcheson, AirTran Airways’ vice-president of marketing and sales. “Falcons 1 will serve millions of passengers and act as a constant reminder of our winning team, the Falcons and AirTran.”

Figures provided by the major US legacy and low-cost airlines shows that in September five of the nine airlines examined reported demand (RPM) growth. AirTran, jetBlue and Southwest all reported growth of between 8% and 11%. Among the legacy carriers only Continental reported growth (of 6.7%), driven by a 9.8% increase in domestic demand and a 20% growth in demand on Pacific routes. However, transatlantic demand was down 2.7%.

Source: Airline websites

For the fourth month running American Airlines produced the worst results with demand down 3.5%. International traffic was down 4.9% with Latin America (down 5.0%) and Pacific (down 8.1%) performing worse than Atlantic traffic (down 4.0%).

Load factors up except at US Airways

The good news, virtually across the board, was that average load factors for September were up at eight out of nine US airlines.

Airline	LF Sep 08	LF Sep 09	LF change
AirTran	74.4%	77.0%	+2.6 points
Alaska Airlines	75.9%	77.9%	+2.0 points
American	76.6%	79.4%	+2.8 points
Continental	77.4%	82.2%	+4.8 points
Delta	81.2%	82.6%	+1.4 points
jetBlue	76.7%	77.6%	+0.9 points
Southwest	63.4%	74.7%	+11.3 points
United	83.2%	85.8%	+2.6 points
US Airways	80.1%	79.3%	-0.8 points
Source: Airline websites

Continental saw load factors rise almost five percentage points while Southwest saw an 11.3 point improvement but still managed to be the only carrier not to fill at least three-quarters of its seats.