Airlines' Crowded Planes Slow Storm Recovery

Passenger jets flying at record 82% capacity this year
By John Johnson,  Newser Staff
Posted Dec 28, 2010 1:38 PM CST
Airlines' Crowded Planes Slow Storm Recovery
A planes is de-iced before takeoff at Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport on Sunday.   (AP Photo/The Star Tribune, Brian Peterson)

When a blizzard the size of this week's arrives on the scene, air travel is going to suffer. But Nate Silver points out something else that's contributing to the slow recovery: airlines are flying with more passengers these days. Through September, "load factors on domestic flights—essentially the percentage of available seats that they filled—ran at 82%, the highest figure since the Department of Transportation began tracking the statistic," writes Silver at his FiveThirtyEight blog. That's up from 70% a decade ago.

It matters because at the 70% figure, "there are 2.3 passengers for every available seat, which means, roughly speaking, that one day’s worth of cancellations might take two days to clear through the system," writes Silver. At 80%, figure about four or five days to get all the passengers home.
(More blizzard stories.)

Get the news faster.
Tap to install our app.
X
Install the Newser News app
in two easy steps:
1. Tap in your navigation bar.
2. Tap to Add to Home Screen.

X