For the heck of it I wanted to compare GDP to airline industry performance, but I wasn’t really sure how. Then I found this handy chart from the ATA that has operating revenues for passenger airlines, which made it pretty easy. So a graph of the data looks like this:
Click on the graph for a larger version.
They seem to move pretty well together, as I got an r-squared value of about 0.90. Then, I decided to take out 2002, because I think it’s fair to say that the airline industry was hit harder than other areas of the economy – then r-squared jumped up to 0.935. Not bad! After playing around with the numbers a bit, I can estimate that a one billion change in GDP will go with a change in airline revenues of about $8.5-8.7 million.
Now, we’ll have to see what happens this year when both GDP and revenues have been hammered.
Cool! How about average fare vs. average income.