Things in the Sky

Well, May is now upon us, and as usual, Continental is the first to reveal its traffic for the prior month, and in honesty, it doesn’t look that bad. Mainline RPMs were down 2.3% compared to April 2008. Meanwhile, international RPMs were actually up 3.4%.

When those RPM numbers are combined with a cut in ASMs, there was a boost in load factors. Mainline was up 3.5 points to 83.1%, and consolidated load factor load factor was up 2.9 points. Regional load factors saw a decline of 1.5 points.

Continental puts a RASM estimate for the month, and says that April 2009 RASM will be down 10.5-11.5% compared to the same month last year. Not great, but better than March’s 18.8% decline.

These numbers look somewhat promising, I think. The increase in international RPMs makes me optimistic, and the capacity cuts seem to be keeping load factors up. Of course, the RASM decline indicates that Continental has had to cut fares to help keep up that traffic. We’ll have to see what happens with this month’s results, as Continental has slashed its capacity to Mexico.