Things in the Sky

Last week, the Air Transport Association released yield data for October, and to be honest, the numbers look kind of encouraging.

First of all, the decrease in yields continues to lessen. Granted, the declines are still in the area of 15%, but it’s progress.  There was improvement in all regions.

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I also decided to graph a the 12-month moving average of yields in order to help remove seasonality from the data. As you can see, there’s been a steady decline throughout the year:

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But there’s been improvement in this number as well – for every region, the decrease from September to October was less than the decrease between August and September.

November’s numbers will probably look even  better, thanks to easier year-over-year comparisons (we’re getting to the point where numbers started to look bad a year ago). Plus, Thanksgiving was a bit late last year, putting more holiday travel into the beginning of December. The holiday is two days earlier on the calendar this year, so that might help a bit.

But, the basic message has been the same for the past few months – things are still bad, but there are signs of improvement.