There are statistics and there are statistics and also my bad translations from Swedish to English ...

I think the newspaper article was ranking the RPK of airlines for European traffic and International traffic. It was not RPK rankings for European or worldwide airlines.

So in terms of European RPK and International RPK, SAS is the 4th and 8th largest airline in the world.

Some statisics from IATA:
For the International traffic (millions of passengers) in 1999 the IATA rankings are:

1. BA 30.3
2. LH 27.3
3. AF 20.7
4. AA 17.4
5. KL 15.3
6. SQ 13.5
7. SK 12.5
8. SR 12.3
9. JL 12.2
10.UA 11.4

Because a lot of European traffic is also international whereas most North American traffic is domestic, airlines such as SK come out ahead of UA.



[This message has been edited by Austman (edited 08-07-2000).]