OAG, the global travel and transport information company recently purchased by United Business Media, has calculated that the world”s scheduled airlines ” including low cost carriers ” offered a record 3.3bn on 28.2m flights during 2006. That represents an average daily offer of over 9m seats on 77,371 individual flights.
Total seat offer year-on-year was up 3.4% from the 3.2bn seats offered in 2005 across 27.7m flights. Scheduled flights increased 1.8% from 2005 to 2006 with 2,856 new direct or re-instated services being introduced during the year.
Of the new flights introduced in 2006 the route with the largest seat offering was the domestic service between Tokyo Haneda and Osaka Kobe in Japan which offered 773,871 seats on 3,853 flights. Domestic services also dominated the top 10 new routes in terms of scheduled flight frequencies. Dallas/Forth Worth Love Field to St Louis Lambert in the US held the number one new route by adding 5,387 frequencies and 723,300 seats in 2006. US domestic routes, including the new helicopter service in New York between JFK and downtown Manhattan, held five of the top 10 places with new Japanese domestic services taking a further four slots.
The longest scheduled route flown in 2006 was between Newark (EWR) and Singapore (SIN) with an elapsed time of 18 hours and 40 minutes. The flight is operated by Singapore Airlines using an Airbus A340-500 to cover the 9,523 miles (8,275 nautical miles; 15,325 kms).
Once again the shortest scheduled route is between Papa Westray (PPW) and Westray (WRY) in the UK with an elapsed time of 2 minutes. The flight is operated by BA franchise Loganair using a Britten-Norman Islander to cover just 9 miles (8 nautical miles; 14 kms).Low cost carriers represent 17% of the total number of scheduled seats on offer worldwide. Within the US the capacity share of the low cost carriers was 27%, slightly more than Europe where the offer was 24%. On a year to year basis the low seat capacity was up nearly 16% globally in 2006.
”The facts show that scheduled airlines offered more seats in 2006 than ever before with more than 3bn seats being made available to the flying public,” explains Duncan Alexander, managing director at OAG, seen here at Routes. ”At a very conservative estimate of a 70% load factor that means over 2.3bn will have flown during 2006. That is more than 6.3m people flying every day of the year on either business or leisure”.
”Given the schedules already in the OAG system for the first quarter of 2007, the trend of more seats and flights being offered by the world”s scheduled airlines, this record looks like being broken in 2007”.