The global airline industry reduced capacity by 20 million
seats over the past week, its largest single weekly capacity cut in recorded
history, according to OAG.
A significant portion of that came from US carriers, which
last week cut 4.4 million seats – a 21 per cent reduction in capacity –
including 3.5 million domestic seats, OAG analyst John Grant said. United
Airlines and Delta Air Lines had week-over-week reductions of 38.1 per cent and
45.7 per cent, respectively. Planned cuts from American Airlines and Southwest
Airlines had not hit last week's data and together should account for an
additional reduction of about 3.5 million seats this week, according to Grant.
CNBC on Sunday reported that US airline executives are
discussing possibly submitting a proposal to the US Department of
Transportation that would allow them to consolidate services on routes during
the crisis, so that passengers with tickets across various carriers all could
fly on a single flight. That would enable carriers to maintain service, per the
stipulations of the US$50 billion in federal relief available to airlines,
while eliminating the costs of running multiple, nearly empty flights on
routes. Such a proposal would require approval from the Trump administration
and for airlines to work out the financial details together.
Data from the US Transportation Security Administration
showed about 180,000 passengers went through airport security checkpoints on
Sunday; by comparison, checkpoints processed more than 450,000 passengers the
prior Sunday and more than 2.5 million on the same day a year ago.
Among global carriers, KLM and British Airways made the
largest cuts in capacity last week, each reducing their number of seats more
than 70 per cent week over week, according to OAG. Jetstar Airways, Latam, Air
Canada, Qantas, Air New Zealand, Interjet, Turkish Airlines and Aer Lingus also
all recorded reductions higher than 55 per cent week over week.
On a country-by-country basis, Brazil had the largest
week-over-week reduction in available seats, down nearly 80 per cent from
nearly 2 million seats to about 400,000 seats. India, which entered lockdown
last week, saw its available seats decrease more than 70 per cent from about
3.6 million to about 1.1 million.
After scheduled cuts take place this week, the bottom could
be in sight, according to Grant.
"It took the airline industry some eight weeks for
global capacity to fall from 106 million to 90 million; it took a further two
weeks for that to fall to 49 million," Grant wrote. "With a number of
schedule updates expected this week and no real signs of capacity in next
week’s current data, we could expect capacity to be closer to 44 million seats
a week. If deeper cuts take place in some of the major markets then we will
perhaps get quite close to 40 million, a point from which we would hope to
begin to see some signs of recovery occurring."
Last week, analysts said during an OAG webinar that they believe they are seeing the beginnings of recovery in the Asian market, giving hope that the situation around the world could start to improve in the coming months.