Aircraft load factors are used to measure aircraft in-flight capacity utilization.
|Domestic Revenue Load Factors (percent)||Dec-03||Dec-04|
|Passenger revenue load factors||73.05||73.03|
|Change from same month previous year||-0.46||-0.03|
|Overall aircraft revenue load factors||54.80||57.00|
|Change from same month previous year||-0.32||2.21|
|Freight revenue load factors||30.67||34.79|
|Change from same month previous year||1.00||4.11|
NOTES: The current value is compared to the value from the same period in the previous year to account for seasonality.
Load factor is related to the potential capacity of a system relative to its actual performance. In order to combine passenger and freight to calculate overall aircraft load factors, a common metric is needed: ton-miles. Thus, it is assumed that a passenger plus baggage weighs 200 pounds. The data include both transborder and foreign flights by large U.S. carriers, but do not include any flights by foreign carriers.
The dramatic changes in the September 2001 data reflect the impact of the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, 2001, on aviation, including several days in which commercial air operations were suspended.
The data reported here excludes small-certificated and commuter carriers that began reporting T100 data in 2002 for comparability with previous issues.
SOURCE: U.S. Department of Transportation, Bureau of Transportation Statistics, Air Carrier Traffic Statistics Monthly, April 2005.