Air Traffic vs Same Week a Year Ago
Key Points
- Air traffic fell to 4% of normal for the weeks ending April 11 and April 18.
- Between April 11 and July 11 traffic from 4% of normal to 27% of normal.
- Between July 11 and September 19 the TSA counts mostly flatlined but the percentage vs a year ago rose to 36% mostly based on easier comparisons.
My charts are from TSA Checkpoint Travel Numbers.
The dates in the chart immediately above are for the weeks ending on those dates (Sunday through Saturday).
Permanent Layoffs Soar, and It Will Get Worse
On August 29 I commented Permanent Layoffs Soar, and It Will Get Worse
October Airline Layoffs Threatened
- United: 36,000
- American: 19,000
- Delta: 2,000
- Spirit: 2,000-3,000
- Southwest 0 (But 17,000 Accepted Extended Time Off or Early Retirement)
The Delta Announcement is for Pilots Only and that is on top of over 1,800 early retirement acceptances.
Allo note that Delta Air Lines said it is still overstaffed even though 17,000 employees are taking buyouts and early retirements.
At a minimum we are talking about a reduction of about 100,000 direct airline jobs.
How Long Will It Take For the Airline Industry to Recover?
Estimates vary widely from 4 to 9 years depending on the source.
Leeham’s best case is 2024 and worse case is 2029. See How Long Will It Take For the Airline Industry to Recover? for details.
Fight for Survival
US airlines are fighting for survival. They have no choice but to shed massive amounts of employees with traffic down about 74% from normal.
Airlines received $25 billion to keep employees on Through September 30. Layoffs begin October 1.
Republican senators introduced a bill yesterday for $28 billion in aid to airlines.
In this political environment it is difficult to say what if anything passes.
Mish
Many people are now working from home which will have a permanent affect on the airlines and there business class traveling.
They’re going to get a bailout, aren’t they?
Not sure the airlines will EVER recover…or that they should, although I will miss the availability of cheap travel. But I do feel for the people losing their jobs…too bad whatever bailout is coming won’t help them.
The TSA’s grim data also shows that the TSA needs to fire more employees. Time to have robots slow us down with no discernable benefit at a cheaper price.
Any chance of some remotely good news?
With winter on the way I can imagine anxiety & depression diagnoses going through the roof. A tragedy for human kind all over the developed world.
We need something to help people look up, not down.
Something to look towards, through this time.
How about we take our minds off politics for a little while and tune in to some football!
Air travel is a pinnacle of a vast set of infrastructures.
Sad fact is when it suffers so does the entire pyramid underneath it.
All the dependent jobs right down to replacement aircraft over time.
Car rental, hotels, coffee bars, every nut & bolt.
The entire aerospace complex will take years to adjust and resize.
No winners outside of commoditised telecom infrastructure providers.
I predict some more airline and travel bankruptcies. I see hotels around me starting to close because hospital tourism is no longer happening. We live in a place where people come to essentially buy their babies through surrogacy. I predict a huge drop in birthrates soon, especially when people figure out that you have a 50% higher chance of dying of Covid if you go to the hospital to have a baby via cesarean.
I wonder what last year’s numbers would have been without the 9/11-TSA factor. Bigger or smaller effect than Covid?
And, will people innovating in social-credit/global-village technology zero out 9/11-TSA costs to their great advantage?
I hope they all shrivel up and disappear. US airlines do not deserve to exist.
Air travel was an abuse of any decent, intelligent passenger who needed to fly occasionally. It deserves what it gets, but I am not holding my breath.
Printing presses are at the ready, and after so much conditioning, it’s a birthright to fly on any whim.
Something intersting about the newly proposed $28b bailout is that $17b of it is unused funds from the first $25b bailout. So it seems that the airlines used less than half of the first bailout funds… I assume that certain tranches of the first bailout had strings attached, like maybe forbidding buybacks and who knows that else?
Buggy whip maker, meet Zoom and Netflix…
I’m actually surprised that the checkpoint count recovered to more than one-third of last summer’s and that it appears to be stable on a nominal basis over the past 3 months (regardless of average ticket price and other revenue-based metrics).
Hey, if you’re longing for a flight, take a flight to nowhere…it’s becoming a thing.
Personally, after a period a while back of years with multiple flights in a week, I would be happy to never get on a flight again…
The longer the flight, the more recirculated air. At least 11,000 Covid infections in the US are because of international air travel in the summer. All it takes is one person with Covid and the inside of the airplane is the perfect environment for airborne transmission.
Thats down, what, 70%? ‘Tis but a scratch!
Nuttin’ a little Fed Pixi Dust can’t handle!
i agree the airlines need to cut back. also agree that the federal money thrown at them to not fire employees has been a waste. it will be wonderful to see the CEO’S fat bonus for bravely fighting his airline crews and not taking a hit himself despite blowing funds on buybacks and dividends
Ah. Survival.
Puts the ‘alive’ part of ‘livelihood’ back in focus.
Saving lives will yield the same ‘unforseen’ outcomes as humanitarian bombing interventions in Libya .
Poor Gaddafi, another favored despot of the right. Let’s have a moment of silence.
…..According to a Gallup poll conducted in 2012, 75% of Libyans were in favor of the NATO intervention, compared to 22% who were opposed.[224] A 2011 Orb International poll also found broad support for the intervention, with 85% of Libyans saying that they strongly supported the action taken to remove the Ghadafi regime.[225]
And Gallup didn’t bother to poll the same Libyans in 2020. I wonder why?
I get it–you like a strong-man to get the the trains to run on time and the oil wells pumping, and keep the unhappy ones locked-up, silenced, tortured and dispossessed.
When someone tells you that they want a world like that, believe them.
But don’t expect everyone to roll over and agree.
Exactly. How can anyone trust a party that threatens to be a strong man by “stacking the court”, adding states to the nation (to dilute opposing viewpoint votes), and remove impediments such as the filibuster? Well, you can’t.
Everything you said is perfectly constitutional.
“Its perfectly constitutional to change the constitution” – Lance Manly
Let’s say your right. Where does it lead if the party in power changes the rules so they never have to cede power.