bradthepilot

Sure, but there is nothing in the data to support your claim about it never getting above one million without a vaccine. That is what I was referring to as pure speculation.

TransWorld

Just don’t buy airline stock in the near future.

pangolin

No it didn’t. Relative year or year is up. Not down. Yes total numbers are down. That’s seasonably normal.

theAiken

year to year is irrelevant, the goal is to get back to normal (whatever that will be). The demand is flat.

we're currently at the highest travel season of the year. I hate to say it but we've stalled.

TransWorld

I’ll predict 1.1 million at Thanksgiving and Christmas. Jury is still out about how much the fall drop is of leisure and how much of a pick up in business next string.

senecacaptain

8-25/Tuesday: 26.0% (25.96)

Soxfan1

I disagree. Last year was normal. Getting closer to last year numbers is important if you want to get back to normal. Tuesday this week was higher than Tuesday last week as a YoY%. Albeit just 0.8% higher, and 0.8% was the same gain Monday this week over last Monday as well. It is not going down, it is going up, barely.

Last year on this Tuesday we were just over 2mil. We are now down 500-700k per day from 2019 peak days that hit 2.5 - 2.7 mil. It’s normal for this years totals to drop too. And so far they are dropping at a slightly slower rate than they did last year, hence the very tiny gains.

Will it stay on this slight gain path - no, I don’t think with the cuts every airline made to sept. But just because it may start to go down very soon, doesn’t mean it is right now.

You will probably be right in your statements within a week or two, but the data is not showing it just yet.

flyinthrew

I started out with the same thought that year over year was irrelevant, but the day of the week pattern so strongly correlates with last year’s day of the week pattern that it’s easy to say now that year over year growth is the MOST relevant item to track. It lends context to yesterdays garbage looking number. Instead of looking like a decrease from last week (sad face) it is an increase of almost a whole percentage point from last week’s year over year percentage. The two lines on the graph are closer together this week than they were last week. That’s the best time of year adjusted way to see how close to normal we are.


Also we’re not at the highest travel season of the year. Not this week anyway. Last year’s Tuesday number was 2 million. That’s as low as it was in February. With the exception of Labor Day weekend, the summer travel season has passed. The rough numbers will look like they’re cratering.

Soxfan1

you can’t just look at week over week in a vacuum, during a historical time period where you always see WoW declines in good years, without looking to see if the decline was more than or less than normal/expected.

Take your example of Monday. Last year week over week the drop from last Mon to this Mon was about 220k. This year the drop was about 50K. Yes, we dropped. No we didn’t drop as a % this year vs last year as much, although to be fair it was not that much less, but still a gain, not a drop.

looking at a 50k drop this Monday over last out of context is like looking at any Monday vs the next day (Tuesday) and seeing a drop and saying we are going down.

I personally think that % YoY same weekday is only way to track the return to normal. And that seems to be a shared consensus on those filling this thread. While painfully small, for the last few weeks, that number is still growing.

I do however expect it to stall soon.

pangolin

Man you were on a roll. Right up until that last line.