December 7, 2009
Delta Air Lines said on Friday that its November traffic fell 7.1%, by far the biggest drop among the major U.S. carriers.
Delta flew 13.57 billion revenue passenger miles, or one paying passenger flown one mile, in November. The drop-off from November 2008 included an 11.2% drop in international traffic and a 4.6% drop in domestic traffic. The results include Northwest, which Delta bought last year.
By comparison, November traffic rose 1.8% at United Airlines and 2.9% at Continental. It fell 1.6% at US Airways and fell 0.5% at American, although American’sfigure didn’t include its regional traffic. November traffic jumped 11.7% at Southwest Airlines.
Delta cut capacity, too. In November it had 17.06 billion available seat miles, down 8.4% from November 2008. Domestic capacity was down 4.2%.
Occupancy, called load factor, rose 1.1 percentage points to 79.6%.
For the first 11 months of the year, Delta traffic is down 6.7%, while it has cut capacity by 6.3%.
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