So is capacity growing or shrinking now?
 

I have been observing things and it seems in the last few months there have been some surprises. I dare say capacity seems to be increasing.

What do you think?

You mean full flights? I think it may be an illusion created by less available flights filling up what is left.

But with airlines putting more and smaller seats in aircraft, adding rows etc, capacity is increasing.

Why guess, all the numbers are here from 2000 to March of this year

http://www.transtats.bts.gov/Data_Elements.aspx?Data=1

and links to things like load factors, etc.

I think OP means amount of seats being flown, not necessarily number of people in them. Is that correct?

Also, the link Cordelli posted (thanks) does show available seat miles and a quick look at first 3 month 2012 vs 2011 does seem to show a little growth in seat miles. But I suspect there is significant variance across carriers.

Yeah. Just getting tired of seeing so many regional jets around. But then I think...out of GRR I am surprised by the amount of flights we have coming in and out now. It's frankly a "busy" airport now. I am not old enough to really know the industry, but for instance it seems surprising that GRR offers flights to DFW, DTW, ORD, CLE, DEN, MCO, BWI, YYZ, TPA, FLL, LAS, SFB, AZA, PIE, CVG, MSP, LGA, EWR, AND IAH.

This seems like a lot of flights, a lot of capacity, and a lot of competition - all from a relatively small airport that seems to be getting busier all the time.

It depends on the time periods we are using. Compared to volume in the 50's, 60's, 70's 80's capacity is trending consistently upwards. Flights have become a fraction the cost of what they were back then and more people use it as transportation. Meanwhile rail and bus travel has been going down in the same time period. Thanks to LCC's (Low CLASS Carriers ha ha ha) like Southworst and Sleasy Jet flying has become accessible to the proletariat.

But looking at shorter periods I am sure we can see a decrease since 2008 when the economy tanked in earnest. I think we are not back up to 2006 numbers yet, at least that is something I read a few months ago.

Looking at one airport can sometimes be misleading. I have clients in Lansing who often drive to GRR because of the presence of carriers such as Frontier and AirTran who do not fly to Lansing and who induce lower fares across the board at GRR vs LAN.

That's pretty impressive. Grand Rapids has about the same population as Spokane (GEG), my home airport. Yet the number of cities served by GRR is double that of GEG.

The issue, I think, is not the population of Grand Rapids vs Spokane per se but the population density of the surrounding 100-150 miles. I have not done any calculations myself, but I would guess the latter calculation would be much greater for Grand Rapids than for Spokane. After all, GRR is only about 130 miles from Chicago and 120 miles from Detroit and there are many cities and towns with substantial populations within that range.

Yeah, some of those are Airtran flights and GRR is pretty confident they will keep Airtran's flights and possibly even pickup flights from Southwest. It does impress me though quite a bit.

I haven't seen it, flights are still really full and changing a flight is a nightmare. I have a friend on a 2 day lay-over in Nashville because his flight was cancelled last night and the next available flight out for him is Monday morning. Though I think he is on SWA, which would explain why he cannot just get moved to another airline.

I think things are still pretty tight right now, especially this Summer with getting flights and seats.


-Patrick

You're not going to believe this, but they are actually increasing the size of Concourse B even at GRR now. This is getting to be awesome.