Insight – The data trends don’t look good for US airlines

Reading the news it looks like US air traffic is headed for a cold spell.  Midway through August CNTravelers shared this view on a large number of flight cancellations.  Looking into 2023, there have been some signs of confidence. n May 2022, IATA thought the airlines worldwide would see a recovery in 2023.  In July 2023 this sentiment was echoed by US airline executives.  In August Fitch was more sanguine, saying the risk of recovery was rising.  The data trends don’t look good for US airlines.

Our approach to the news is always to go to the data – what does the data tell us? Starting with this chart, note the number of flights has recovered and looks comfortably ahead of 2019.  But the yellow line listing passengers per flight is not close to 2019 levels.  Are US airlines getting ahead of themselves?