IATA: AIRLINE INDUSTRY LOST $15 BILLION LAST YEAR

IATA: AIRLINE INDUSTRY LOST $15 BILLION LAST YEAR    Pierre Jeanniot, director general of the International Air Transport Association, said that the global airline industry lost about $15 billion last year.
   “Before Sept. 11, as a result of recessionary trends in many major travel generating countries, we were likely to face losses in the range of $2.5 billion for 2001 on the international scheduled services of IATA airlines worldwide,” he told a conference in Madrid last week (on Jan. 29).
   This was to be the first loss for the industry since 1993.
   However, the impact of Sept. 11 has dramatically worsened the financial results and operating performances of airlines.
   “Now, for the year as a whole, at the moment we think that traffic went down by 6.9 percent but capacity by only 0.7 percent,” he said. “Average yields fell by 4 percent… but there was no change for the year on unit cost.”
   “Those terrible figures, if confirmed later, mean that the IATA carriers lost $10 billion,” he said. In addition, U.S. carriers lost between $3 billion and $5 billion on their domestic services, Jeanniot added.
   “We are. even in the best of times.an industry that operates on very thin financial margins,” he said.