Originally Posted by lensman

Agreed.

IIRC, the DOT 10% sample will give you passenger counts by airline by departure/arrival by "aggregated fare class". You won't know date, day of week, or flight. You also have to match up against historical flight schedules to know seats, but if you did so you could calculate average load factor for the carrier.

I don't recall looking much at the fare class breakdowns back when I was working with this data. We did work heavily in the O&D/market data and the departure/arrival/carrier passenger counts out of the coupon data.

I also don't know how carriers report upgrades or buyups when reporting this data to the DOT.