AMEN to that.

PS - still no response from AA on the letter I sent them last week.

Three points: first, I've read both +0.3% and +6.4% for Black Friday sales over last year; I think it depends on exactly what you measure.

Second, I flew into LGA on AA last night, arriving at 10:30 PM. The AA taxi line is usually non-existant to short. This time, it was not only around the corner (which I've only seen once or twice), but went back into the terminal. The other taxi lines in the main terminal were at least twice as long as I've ever seen before. I walked to the US Airways terminal and there was nobody on line there.

Third, I think that the amount of travel is dominated by macroeconomic concerns and there's not going to be any way to separate TSA concerns from it.

You may be right. The .3% is the one I read. Not only that, the big retailers took a different approaches this year to Black Friday (pre-sales, free shipping, etc. ) than in the past so the numbers are difficult to compare year to year. I do know that through the end of the sales season, they are being very aggressive in their advertising expenses so they must have research that indicates it will be money will be spent.

Yes, the economic conditions may be the dominant factor.

From an airline management perspective, the more salient points here would be to look at LF on Sunday (especially) and Monday. There has been a growing trend in recent years for the outbound Thanksgiving travel to be spread across the days leading up to the Wednesday before, so there is a steady build of travel on Monday, Tuesday, culminating with a peak on Wednesday, and then some travel still early Thursday. Then all of those people return on Sunday or Monday. It used to be everybody flew out on Wednesday and back on Sunday.

However, the memory of tradition is strong, and almost everyone associates the Wednesday before as the heavy travel day, which is why calling for NOOD on that day was especially effective.

From my own observation with these trend patterns in mind, air travel was down across the board this year. When your job is to follow trend graphs, then assess the damage in hindsight, one gets very good at understanding on a visceral level how people move. I picked random data points leading up to NOOD (which I've discussed in another thread) and routes that I would've expected to be booked solid based on a particular airline's regional/hub strengths and brand recognition in those markets. They weren't.

The only outlier was AA, as Richard Kenner hinted earlier in this thread with his experience at LGA. I attribute that more to AA's singularly spectacular revenue management than anything else. They are by far and away the most competent forecasters in the industry, and always have been. My research leading up to NOOD also supports this development. As for, say the US taxi line at LGA, they have all but shuttered LGA as a focus city, regardless of what they say. It's an internal strategy that isn't playing out well for them, and while NYC wasn't a market I followed all that closely, I don't remember there being much late night traffic in LGA for them.

I also noticed on my own personal flights that LF's were well below 30% across markets, not just for individual flights, and that's what the analysts will be looking at.

So, in summary, air traffic across the industry system was, at best, flat. It was likely a combination of a perfect storm: poor economy, too-aggressive management of yields, infrequent flyers finally fed up with ancillary fees, and TSA pushback. TSA pushback is less likely to have had a strong impact as most of those travelers would've purchased their tickets long before the uproar, though a sustained pattern of the kind seen this past weekend will certainly indicate some turning of the tide.

IMHO, it will be the next draconian measure that will finally get people fed up for good in large enough numbers to be noticed. The shoes and liquids nonsense is a manageable inconvenience. The current NoS nonsense may have finally grabbed peoples' attention. The next big change may actually be the straw that breaks TSA's back. That's why sustained effort on our part is vital to effecting the change we want to see for effect security.

It will be definetly intresting to see if the pattern that we witnessed during the last several days continues. I have heard mentioned that January and Feburary are an airline accountants nightmare so IF this trend continues maybe, just maybe, it might get some of the airline ceos to pull the fencepost out of their butts.

Any ideas what this next draconian measure would be?, my guess is that TSA makes the nudo-o-scopes mandatory or the genital gropings get even more invasive IF that is humanly possible.