American Airlines’ February Traffic Boosted by International Passengers

Rising numbers of international passengers flying American Airlines have helped increase the air carrier’s traffic by 2.2% in February. As AA also added new flights the previous month, they also reported more empty seats. The number of miles the passengers have actually flown has also increased by 190,000 compared to February 2010, reaching 8.63 billion miles. Yet as capacity grew faster than traffic, February brought a filling percentage of 74.8 per flight, down from 75.5 in the same month of 2010.

International flight bookings led the rise for American Airlines. The international traffic was up 6% with the Pacific and Latin America leading in the top of popular routes. This traffic increase while US flights remained the same is also powered by American Airlines increasing international capacity by 8.5 percent and decreasing US capacity by 0.2%.

Although bold at the beginning of the year, American Airlines has revised its capacity growth plans for 2011 and actually cut them by 1 percentage point. This is of course caused by their inability to fill the newly added flights and all the turmoil caused by the imminence of higher air flight prices in the near future.

AA and its partner American Eagle, both belonging to parent company AMR Corp. was initially planning to increase capacity by a little over 4%. Yet AMR was the only major US airline company to post losses for 2010.