Airlines Are Setting Their Own Rules And Packing More People Onto Flights
This article is published in partnership with Newsy.
As America creeps — or in some cases, sprints — back to business amid an ongoing pandemic, there’s at least one industry that’s largely charting its own course through the crisis: airlines.
Like most industries, the coronavirus has hit airlines hard, and they are eager to return to normal. But unlike many others, the companies have received billions in dedicated relief funding with very little federal oversight on how to ramp up operations safely.
Most airlines suggest but don’t require that passengers wear masks. Some have encouraged social distancing by not filling middle seats. But others continue to pack passengers into all available seats. Ultimately, the need to fill seats, combined with limited regulation, means the number of people traveling on planes is rebounding.
“Load factor” is the industry measure of how full a plane is. Airlines report those numbers in quarterly financial filings and in monthly reports to the Bureau of Transportation Statistics. But those reports are typically not released until weeks or even months later. In late March, as the coronavirus ravaged the industry, the trade association Airlines for America began voluntarily posting daily data on its website that included average load factors.
In 2019, the average domestic flight was 85.1% full. In mid-April ― the height of the coronavirus pandemic in the U.S. ― that figure plummeted to 9.4%.
Airlines responded to the low demand in part by cutting the number of flights. That meant that, as people started to resume air travel, the available flights were carrying more passengers and the load factor began rising again. By the week of April 27, domestic flights were averaging 22.5% full. That’s when the industry group dropped the average load factor from its daily updates.
The organization said it stopped providing the figure because it was being “misconstrued with the financial health of the industry,” at a...
