Onboard loans (T100s) for September
 

Here are the onboard loads for Midwest and select Milwaukee competitors for the month of September. Remember, as always, that onboard loads are only half the picture when trying to guess relative performance, and say little or nothing about yield and traffic composition.

Midwest
93.4% ….. MKE ….. LAS
89.2% ….. MCI ….. SEA
87.6% ….. MKE ….. DEN
87.2% ….. MKE ….. PHX
84.3% ….. MCI ….. SFO
83.8% ….. MKE ….. LAX
83.5% ….. MKE ….. TPA
83.2% ….. MCI ….. BOS
82.9% ….. MKE ….. BOS
82.3% ….. MKE ….. LGA
81.3% ….. MKE ….. PHL
78.4% ….. MCI ….. LGA
77.9% ….. OMA ….. DCA
76.6% ….. MKE ….. MCO
76.5% ….. MKE ….. DCA
75.6% ….. MCI ….. LAX
74.7% ….. MKE ….. MSP
74.3% ….. MCI ….. DCA
71.4% ….. MKE ….. EWR
67.6% ….. MKE ….. MSN
67.4% ….. MKE ….. ATL
66.7% ….. MKE ….. DFW
64.9% ….. MKE ….. GRB
63.9% ….. MKE ….. IND
63.7% ….. MKE ….. MCI
63.6% ….. MKE ….. OMA
62.6% ….. MKE ….. GRR
58.1% ….. MKE ….. PIT
56.4% ….. MKE ….. BNA
56.3% ….. MKE ….. ATW
54.8% ….. MKE ….. CLE
53.6% ….. MKE ….. DSM
49.3% ….. MKE ….. CMH
48.7% ….. MKE ….. SDF
45.8% ….. MKE ….. DAY
43.6% ….. MKE ….. FNT

AirTran
93.4% ….. MKE ….. SEA
92.1% ….. MKE ….. LAS
91.4% ….. MKE ….. SFO
82.1% ….. MKE ….. TPA
79.8% ….. MKE ….. DEN
75.2% ….. MKE ….. LAX
72.9% ….. MKE ….. MCO
70.1% ….. MKE ….. BWI
68.2% ….. MKE ….. LGA
67.4% ….. MKE ….. ATL
64.3% ….. MKE ….. STL
62.7% ….. MKE ….. MSP
60.5% ….. MKE ….. DCA
56.9% ….. MKE ….. BOS

Frontier
91.1% ….. MKE ….. DEN

A few notes:

(a) In many markets, the summer peak has definitely passed.

(b) MKE-LAX ended on NW this month, so both Midwest and AirTran likely benefitted form that and posted good loads. However it will be interesting to see subsequent months because traffic has definitely dminished since fall to LAX. In the current period...the lull between Thanksgiving and Christmas...AirTran pulled their normal morning MKE-LAX nonstop for apparent lack of demand, and their evening MKE-LAX nonstop is sometimes going out with only a few dozen passengers from what I'm hearing. And Midwest's daily morning MKE-LAX nonstop (in spite of no morning nonstop competition in this period) often carries loads that an E190 could hold. Now things will turn around sharply around 12/18 for a couple of weeks. But early December is a preview of the lull betwen New Year's and spring break. Overcapacity seems to be the name of the game, and one wonders if there will be more capacity pulls, or empty planes, or both.

(c) The west coasd routes which AirTran cut last fall, especially the monopolies to SFO and SEA, flew rather full this September. Boston didn't do as well. Curious that usually-emptier STL actually ran fuller than MSP in the month.

(d) As I did with August's numbers, I pulled out some "thru" numbers for AirTran. The T100's include a section telling the number of people flying between city pairs without a change of planes, so we can see specifically on those flights how many passengers flew (for example) LAX-MKE-LGA just on the thru flights. It doesn't tell us how many people connected in those sorts of markets. Here are some September thru passenger numbers for routings via their MKE operation, with # being average thru passengers per flight.

MSP-(MKE)-BOS ..... 31 average thru passenges per flight
MSP-(MKE)-LGA ..... 10 average thru passengers per flight
MSP-(MKE)-DCA ..... 28 average thru passengers per flight
LGA-(MKE)-MSP ..... 32 average thru passengers per flight
BWI-(MKE)-MSP ..... 7 average thru passengers per flight
STL-(MKE)-DCA ..... 7 average thru passengers per flight
STL-(MKE)-LGA ..... 9 average thru passengers per flight
DCA-(MKE)-STL ..... 9 average thru passengers per flight
MKE-(STL)-MCO ..... 11 average thru passengers per flight
DCA-(MKE)-SEA ..... 16 average thru passengers per flight
SEA-(MKE)-DCA ..... 11 average thru passengers per flight
SFO-(MKE)-MCO ..... 13 average thru passengers per flight
BOS-(MKE)-SFO ..... 3 average thru passengers per flight
DCA-(MKE)-LAX ..... 8 average thru passengers per flight
LAX-(MKE)-LGA ..... 21 average thru passengers per flight

Remember, these are just the the passengers on flights operated as "thru" flights with no change of plane / change of flight number. In addition to these thru passengers there is an unspecified number of connecting passengers we can't see from these monthly stats.

Midwest runs few "thru" flights, and for September Republic did not report them as "thru" so we don't have similar numbers for Midwest.

Yes, I am particularly interested in AirTran's MKE-LAX performance. I am booked on FL for that route in early February, so I hope it survives the long, cold winter. I was originally booked on NW for that trip, but canceled it after the NW nonstop was dropped. Hopefully, my FL replacement isn't up the creek, too.

I flew that route in early November, returning the weekend after Thanksgiving. There wasn't a seat available on the outbound flight.

Returning the typically slow weekend after Thanksgiving had 50 pax on board.

I've finally had some time to post some thoughts on these numbers.

Looking at the East Coast business destinations, I'm somewhat surprised to see just how little local traffic AirTran is carrying on these routes.

It also seems that MSP is a critical link for LGA and DCA in particular. Without all of those thru and connecting passengers from the twin cities, the loads would have been much, much lower.

I'm curious to see who performs better on MKE-BWI this winter.

Also, it's somewhat interesting to see how weak MKE-ATL has been for Midwest this year despite the capacity reduction. I've been wondering about the status of this route for a long-time, especially since there's little difference in fare between Midwest and AirtRan.

Thanks as usual for posting these stats ^