Cheapflights has been chronicling airline capacity cuts throughout the year. Now, from Official Airline Guide (OAG website: www.oag.com), a glimpse of the Big Picture. OAG says there will be 59.7 million fewer airline seats flying around up there worldwide during the fourth quarter of 2008 than there were during the same period last year. That’s a seven percent fall off.
United States capacity cuts comprise a significant share of those 59.7 million seats. OAG says the U.S. domestic market will account for just under 20 million of those seats – 33 percent. The airline industry data company labels what’s happening, “potentially…the most widespread crisis to hit the aviation industry in recent memory.”
OAG Chief Operating Officer Steve Casely says, “The data speaks for itself. It took a good three years for the [airline] industry to recover from the downturn of 2001 when it had a five percent drop in capacity and a seven percent drop in flights. Steady annual growth since 2002 looks set to plummet in the fourth quarter this year with an unprecedented global decline of seven percent.”
That global decline, of course, is largely prompted by the cost of raw petroleum, and the stuff into which it’s refined: Jet A aviation fuel.
© Cheapflights Ltd Jerry Chandler
