Daily Airline News

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.

Ten years ago Qantas was struggling. Dangerously thin profits, if not outright losses in some periods, drove its then-CEO Alan Joyce to undertake controversial cost-cutting measures. Fast forward to 2024, and Qantas is earning higher margins now than before the pandemic. With a new leadership team in place, Qantas believes things will get even better. In this week's feature story we separate the facts from the marketing fluff and ask what the future holds for the Flying Kangaroo.

Europe’s economy isn’t exactly firing on all cylinders. If anything, it’s the booming inbound tourism sector that’s preventing an outright recession. Yet outbound tourism remains strong too, notably from Germany…

All major U.S. airlines have now reported their Q2 results, which in the aggregate looked pretty good. But while Alaska, Delta, and United thrived, others encountered more difficulties dealing with…

As Mick Jagger made clear, you can’t always get what you want. IAG wanted Spain’s Air Europa and had a deal to buy it. But it’s walking away because, ahem,…

A man on the moon? The fall of the Soviet Union? The Chicago Cubs winning a World Series? Nobody thought these things would happen. Until they did. Now, Southwest is…

It wants oh so badly to beat Delta. But it will have to try again in Q3. In Q2, United delivered solid profits. But Delta’s margins were still a bit…

Uh oh. Domestic overcapacity. Fares down. Unit revenues worse than expected.

Air France/KLM is sick and tired of winning bronze medals. IAG always takes the gold. Lufthansa always takes the silver. And that's unlikely to change this summer, with the Olympic…