Issues

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.