Now in Patrick Smith's ASK THE PILOT column on Salon.com...
AIRLINES: The biggest, richest, the best and the worst
On airline size:
"...'Emirates Airline, owned by the government of Dubai, is a small presence among international giants,'" so said a USA Today front-page story on May 5. Emirates, the reporters continued, offers "just two daily direct flights to the United Arab Emirates."
That was a coffee-spitter if ever there was one, and about the most ludicrous characterization of an airline I've ever heard. A small presence * in the United States * is presumably what they meant. At last count, Emirates is the eighth-largest airline in the world measured by revenue passenger kilometers (RPKs), ahead of players like JAL, Qantas, Singapore Airlines and Cathay Pacific, and just a notch behind British Airways. Its all-widebody fleet includes the planet's largest number of Boeing 777s and A380s, with over 50 of the latter still on order. It operates hundreds of daily flights, not "just two," into its Dubai mega-hub.
Airline size is a relative thing. It depends how you measure it. The simplest gauge is just to tally up the total number of passengers carried annually. Using this method, the largest carrier on the planet over the past several years has been -- would you believe it -- Southwest. That's fairly astonishing for an airline that operates nothing but short-haul 737s. Frequency. Volume. Quantity.
But a more accurate metric is something called a revenue passenger kilometer, or RPK. One passenger traveling one kilometer equals one RPK. In other words, flying a hundred people from Cape Town to London outscores flying them from Dallas to Phoenix. Except, running Dallas to Phoenix 12 times a day can make up the difference. Thus RPKs account for customer volume, frequency of flights and distances flown.
This kicks Southwest down to a more realistic seventh place. By the same token, Emirates is the planet's eighth largest in RPKs, yet fails to crack the top 20 in passengers (still not "small presence" material by any stretch, but smaller). Little known China Southern is at No. 6 in total passengers, but 14th by RPKs. And so on...."
Also in the story:
Which carriers are the most profitable, and why?
Plus, a look at the SkyTrax airline quality rankings.
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