The global airline industry reduced capacity by 20 million seats over the past week, its largest single weekly capacity cut in recorded history, according to OAG.
A significant portion of that came from U.S. carriers, which last week cut 4.4 million seats—a 21 percent reduction in capacity—including 3.5 million domestic seats, OAG analyst John Grant said. United Airlines and Delta Air Lines had week-over-week reductions of 38.1 percent and 45.7 percent, respectively. Planned cuts from American Airlines and Southwest Airlines had not hit last week's data and together should account for an additional reduction of about 3.5 million seats this week, according to Grant.
CNBC on Sunday reported that U.S. airline executives are discussing possibly submitting a proposal to the U.S. Department of Transportation that would allow them to consolidate service on routes during the crisis, so that passengers with tickets across various carriers all could fly on a single flight. That would enable carriers to maintain service, per the stipulations of the $50 billion in federal relief available to airlines, while eliminating the costs of running multiple nearly empty flights on routes. Such a proposal would require approval from the Trump administration and for airlines to work out the financial details together.
Data from the U.S. Transportation Security Administration showed about 180,000 passengers went through airport security checkpoints on Sunday; by comparison, checkpoints processed more than 450,000 passengers the prior Sunday and more than 2.5 million on the same day a year ago.
Among global carriers, KLM and British Airways made the largest cuts in capacity last week, each reducing their number of seats more than 70 percent week over week, according to OAG. Jetstar Airways, Latam, Air Canada, Qantas, Air New Zealand, Interjet, Turkish Airlines and Aer Lingus last week also all recorded reductions higher than 55 percent week over week.
On a country-by-country basis, Brazil had the largest week-over-week reduction in available seats, down nearly 80 percent from nearly 2 million seats to about 400,000 seats. India, which entered lockdown last week, saw its available seats decrease more than 70 percent from about 3.6 million to about 1.1 million.
After scheduled cuts take place this week, the bottom could be in sight, according to Grant.
"It took the airline industry some eight weeks for global capacity to fall from 106 million to 90 million; it took a further two weeks for that to fall to 49 million," Grant wrote. "With a number of schedule updates expected this week and no real signs of capacity in next week’s current data, we could expect capacity to be closer to 44 million seats a week. If deeper cuts take place in some of the major markets then we will perhaps get quite close to 40 million, a point from which we would hope to begin to see some signs of recovery occurring."