Things in the Sky

I think I’ve discussed why Hawaiian’s results can look kind of weird in the past, but I wanted to re-visit the topic since the February traffic numbers were just released.

Passengers carried in February 2009 were up 15.1% compared to the same month in 2009, but RPMs are only up 0.9%, and ASMs were up 2.4%, bringing load factor down 1.2 points to 83%. What gives? It’s because of the way load factor is calculated.

For those who don’t know, load factor is RPMs (revenue passenger miles) divided by ASMs (available seat miles). The boost in passengers is mostly coming from the interisland flights, as Hawaiian has picked up some of Aloha’s traffic. These passengers, obviously, generate a much smaller amount of RPMs than those on the long-haul flights. To give an example, San Diego-Honolulu is 2,614 miles while Honolulu-Maui is 101 miles.

I  wish Hawaiian released separate traffic statistics for the interisland and long-haul flying.

These two slides from a recent Hawaiian presentation make the picture a bit clearer:

I found those graphs pretty interesting – looks like essentially Aloha’s service wasn’t replaced on the long-haul flights, and only some of it has been picked up by other carriers in the interisland market.

By the way, you can find that whole slide presentation here. (You can also find there the webcast that goes along with it, though I just skimmed through the slides.)