L-Shaped Recovery for Air Lines. Staking their future on a vaccine.

American Airlines on Friday, and Delta Air Lines on Thursday, warned about once-again slowing bookings. The highly profitable business air travel segment remains essentially in zombie-status, but leisure travel perked up a little in recent months, and over Thanksgiving inched up further by a microscopic amount. But total travel remains woefully down from last year even during the best day, and is now heading lower again.

The number of passengers going through TSA checkpoints to enter the secured areas at US airports during the post-Thanksgiving week through Saturday, December 5, compared to the same weekday in the same week last year, showed the deterioration: between -64.2% and -69.2%. And what the airlines warned about is a decline of bookings from these already low levels.

The chart shows the total number of TSA checkpoint screenings in 2020 (red) and 2019 (green) for each day and the seven-day moving average (bold lines). The four spikes of over 1 million daily screenings over the Thanksgiving travel period (Friday Nov 20; Sunday Nov 22; Wednesday Nov 25; and Sunday Nov 29) were a pale imitation of last year’s spikes during that time, but on the best of these days, Nov 22, the year-over-year decline narrowed to -54.9%, which was the least worst collapse since the collapse of the airline business started in March: CLICK for complete article