Here are the MKE traffic stats for January 2012

Market share by carrier:

……. 2012 …….. 2011
....34.8% ….. 31.8% ……. AirTran
....19.1% ….. 30.1% ……. Frontier
....16.7% ….. 14.7% ……. Delta
....12.5% ……. 9.2% ……. Southwest
......7.6% ……. 6.1% ……. United + Continental
......5.4% ……. 4.0% ……. USAirways
......3.3% ……. 3.3% ……. American
......0.3% ……. 0.2% ……. Air Canada
......0.2% ……. 0.4% ……. Other

2012 and 2011 traffic numbers:

…….. 2012 …….. 2011
….. 209,991 ….. 225,016 ……. AirTran
….. 115,296 ….. 213,253 ……. Frontier
….. 100,614 ….. 104,315 ……. Delta
….... 75,251 ……. 65,016 ……. Southwest
…….. 45,651 ……. 43,321 ……. United + Continental
…….. 32,592 ……. 28,613 ……. USAirways
…….. 20,065 ……. 23,097 ……. American
………. 1,704 ………. 1,714 ……. Air Canada
………. 1,432 ………. 3,220 ……. Other

Year--over-year change in passengers ranked. Note that some of the carriers (like Delta) with a greater market share still carried fewer passengers in 2012 than 2011, but did not shrink as fast as the overall airport.

…. -97,957 ……. Frontier
…. -15,025 ……. AirTran
…… -3,701 ……. Delta
…… -3,032 ……. American
…… -1,788 ……. Other
………… -10 ……. Air Canada
…….. 2,330 ……. United + Continental
…….. 3,979 ……. USAirways
…… 10,235 ……. Southwest

Finally, here are the totals for MKE as a whole, plus the four previous years to see how they compare.

2012 ….. 602,596
2011 ….. 707,565 ….. 2012 is 14.8% lower than 2011
2010 ….. 681,565 ….. 2012 is 11.6% lower than 2010
2009 ….. 487,279 ….. 2012 is 23.7% higher than 2009**
2008 ….. 596,732 ….. 2012 is 1.0% higher than 2008

**(YX made big cuts Sept 08, and FL still suspended east-west operation for winter then)

When I did a quick run of capacity for summer (I used a weekday in July) it looks like Frontier will be at about 10.5% Milwaukee market share.

One side point I noticed in the MKE monthly stats which may be interesting when the January T100's come out in late April. For airlines which only fly one capacity of aircraft you can use the MKE numbers to get a preliminary look at load factor. Southwest is one of those airlines since everything they normally schedule into MKE has 137 seats.

Southwest January 2011
65,016 passengers on 730 flight
89.1 pax per flight, approximate LF of 65.0%


Southwest January 2012
75,213 passengers on 1,018 flights
73.9 pax per flight, approximate LF of 53.9%


Passengers increased nearly 16%, but capacity increased nearly 40%

A load factor under 55% is certainly weak, even for January. But that alone isn't all that interesting. What's interesting is how they apparently got it.

Last January (2011) Southwest flew some soft markets (BWI, MCI) and filled about 53% of seats to those cities. They also flew to some stronger sun markets (MCO, LAS, TPA, PHX) and filled about 81% of seats.

This January (2012) Southwest did have some year-over-year additions (STL which is probably weak and DEN which should be decent), but the big change is that they took over the majority of AirTran's MKE-MCO and MKE-LAS flying for most of January. Even though January is a slow month, last year AirTran still filled about 85% of their seats to LAS and MCO. For Southwest to average less than 55% full across all MKE flights they must have had comparably weak loads to LAS and MCO, Southwest flights replacing AirTran ones which ran 85% full last year. And why would Southwest carry weak loads? Because AirTran passengers can't connect to Southwest flights, and without connecting feed the MKE operation simply had too much capacity.

At this point, I post this as an aside in the MKE thread as concern about how things will turn out with their gradual-phase-out strategy if they don't code share. MKE already seemed set up to fail with DSM-MKE and CAK-MKE likely losing buckets of money. I'm concerned that if at some point Southwest management sees MKE lost $X million, it won't be $X million with an asterisk because of how they chose to schedule things in a set-up-to-fail manner. It will simply be that MKE lost $Xmillion. That's what I believe happened with Frontier in Milwaukee, and it is not encouraging to see Southwest fly nearly half-empty here because of how they chose to schedule things by putting WN metal in without code sharing.

When we have more "meat" from the T100's for January, perhaps it's a subject to bring up in FL or WN boards. This is only preliminary stuff and is only as accurate as MKE's traffic total. But if those T100's loads are as weak as they need to be for the average to be below 55%, it's worth concern.

I didn't have the projected July 2012 capacity market share numbers with me yesterday, but have them now.

35.4% ….. fl
22.4% ….. dl
14.6% ….. wn
10.8% ….. f9
7.6% ….. ua
4.5% ….. us
3.9% ….. aa
0.7% ….. ac

Wow...a combined 50% market share for FL/WN and DL at number two. I'm guessing overall pullback at MKE and the new LGA/JFK routes will help DL's numbers this summer.

Yup -- I used later July for the summer peak to include Delta's JFK and LGA flights, but not include the AirTran/Southwest cuts planned with the August 10th change. I'd guess that FL+WN could top 50% in June prior to the Delta LGA addition, but may slide somewhat below 50% after that 8/10 schedule goes from 58 to 50 combined FL+WN flights. Most other MKE airlines don't have seasonal adjustments of that magnitude come fall. But while the WN/FL schedule is probably set for early fall, other airlines at MKE (including F9 of course) don't lock in their schedule that far out, so there's plenty of latitude for DL, F9, UA, US and AA to make Milwaukee changes up or down for fall.

A minor scheduling item, but U.S. Airways is increasing frequency on MKE-PHL starting this Spring (3x daily to 4x daily). Unfortunately all flights are on CRJ 200 aircraft but at least there is some back-filling of the Frontier capacity. This could be a good route for the E170 or similar sized CRJ.

Hooray! That's my route.

I'll take increased capacity now ... but I'm hoping for a bigger plane sometime too.

I'm hopeful MKE sees more seats to Philadephia and Newark, especially if that means larger planes. What works against an upgrade for US* on MKE-PHL is that Air Wisconsin has a maint base in Milwaukee and they are all-CRJ. AWAC usually gets all or nearly all of the rotations in and out of Milwaukee for USAirways (except PHX) for that reason.

I can't remember how long ago this was, but in the not too distant past U.S. Airways flew MKE-PHL 5x daily with a mix of E170s, E145s, and CRJs. They even had some mainline on MKE-CLT (I believe it was the RON flight). It would be funny if Republic operated some of these flights in the future.

I rarely post here and unfortunately fly even less, but I still browse this board for such insightful commentary. Thanks for all you contribute Knope

And, the Journal Sentinel picks up the story.

http://www.jsonline.com/business/mit...140979883.html