2nd Quarter Airline Financial Data
Posted on 09/20/2006
If you’re an airline junkie (like me) and you’re your interested in quarterly financial results you may be interested in visiting the website of the Department of Transportation’s Bureau of Transportation Statistics www.bts.gov – Look under the second item under recent releases. On the site the DOT does an overview of the 2nd Quarter Financial Statistics for 21 airlines in the US, breaking them out into Network Carriers, Low Cost Carriers, and Regional Carriers.
The results are for domestic flying only and not include international routes. The 2nd Quarter is interesting because it is the most profitable quarter the airlines have had since 2000 and is deemed to be the turnaround quarter for airlines.
In terms of operating profit percentages the Low Cost Carriers (LCC) had the best performances at 10.6%. the regional carriers were second at 7.9% and the Network Carriers were at 7.2%.In the LCC group, Southwest was first at 16.4% (oh the beauty of fuel hedges), AirTran Airways was second at 10.3%, Jet Blue was 3rd at 7.7%, and Frontier Airlines was 5th at 4.2%. In the Network Carrier group, Northwest was 1st at 13.7%, Delta 2nd at 11.1%, and US Airways was 3rd with 8.3%. Last place went to Continental at -0.08%. I find it hard to believe but Continental actually lost money on their domestic flying during the 2nd quarter of 2006! They actually were profitable overall for the 2nd quarter when you add in their international flying, which overcame their domestic flying net loss and then comes. The problem was due to the fact that they are tied with US Airways for 1st place with the highest domestic unit cost at 17 cents per mile.
Overall the report shows that the airline financial picture is getting better with a few exceptions. Fortunately all CAK airlines have shown significant improvements!
