Gordon Smith is Airlines Editor at Skift and Editor at Airline Weekly. He’s been writing about the sector for more than a decade and enjoyed a front-row seat for some of the aviation industry’s biggest stories. Since joining Skift in January 2024, he has interviewed more than a dozen global airline CEOs, often helping make headlines along the way (special thanks to Michael O’Leary!). His informed insights have led to contributions for international media, including the London Evening Standard and Canada’s CBC Radio.
It wasn’t Delta’s greatest summer. Enough went wrong (the CrowdStrike disruption, lost business during the Olympics) to spoil all that went right (strong demand, cheaper fuel). Fortunately, almost everything’s coming up roses this fall, including heavy capacity cuts by domestic rivals. Will United finally beat Delta in the margin fight? We’ll find out later this week, when Scott Kirby and company report for Q3.
What’s the right tool to fix Southwest? A scalpel or a sledgehammer? As a Wall Street dissident leans toward the latter, calling for wholesale change in the airline’s executive ranks, the executives themselves are championing a less radical approach. What the company needs, argued CEO Bob Jordan last week, is not a new leadership team but a network and inflight product adapted to meet new post-Covid trends.
Cost pressures. Cooling demand. Geopolitical turbulence. Despite all of this, the second quarter of 2024 was a good one for the global passenger airline industry. Collectively, major airlines that disclose their quarterly financial results (most of them do) earned an 8% Q2 operating margin adjusted for special items. Airline Weekly crunches the big numbers for our flagship quarterly review.
Aegean Airlines has painful memories. In the early 2010s, Greece was in the throes of a great depression, a crisis that nearly forced it out of the euro-zone. The airline, sure enough, suffered three straight years of losses from 2010 to 2012, aggravated by a surge in fuel prices. This week we discover how Aegean not only survived, but thrived under intense macroeconomic pressure.
Airline Weekly analysis of Cirium Diio data shows fascinating shifts in Southwest's route network over the past decade. In this week's episode we drill into the detail.
