Frontier Airlines reports fall in traffic, capacity for February 2009

Frontier Airlines, the low-fare airline based in Denver, Colorado, the United States, has announced that its traffic for February 2009 fell by 19.9% compared to the same period a year ago, mainly on account of a deceleration in demand for air travel.

The carrier flew 664,930 paying passengers in February 2009, as against 760,816 paying passengers in February 2008, Frontier Airlines said in a statement.
In February 2008, the airline had cut capacity by 15.4% to 810.6 million available seat-miles from 957.6 million seat-miles.

With traffic falling faster than capacity, Frontier Airlines said, occupancy (or, load factor) dropped to 73.6% from 77.8% a year earlier.

While yield (or, revenue per mile flown by paying customers), declined by 1.4% to 9.81 cents per mile, unit revenue (or, revenue as a ratio of capacity) came down by 6.7% to 7.22 cents per available seat-mile.

Frontier Airlines said its revenue passenger miles (paying passengers times miles flown) came down by 19.9% in February 2009 from a year earlier to 596,736,000. In January 2009, the airline had reported 632,946,000 revenue passenger miles. Meanwhile, Lynx Aviation, a short-haul subsidiary of Frontier Airlines, also reported that traffic has tumbled by 15.7% to 23.3 million revenue passenger miles. Capacity of Lynx Aviation, which operates feeder service for Frontier Airlines, fell by 9.4% to 43.1 million available seat-miles, and load factor came down to 54.1% from 58.2% compared to a year before.

Lynx Aviation, which started service in December 2007, carried 67,914 passengers in February 2009 – 8.3% more than the figure for February 2008.

Both Frontier Airlines, which is now in its 15th year of operations, and Lynx Aviation are owned by Frontier Airlines Holdings Incorporated. According to the company’s statement, Frontier Airlines, in conjunction with a fleet of 10 Bombardier Q400 lanes operated by Lynx Aviation, offers routes to over 50 destinations in the United States, Mexico and Costa Rica.

Frontier Airlines Holdings also said it had a commitment for $40 million in ‘debtor-in-possession’ financing from Republic Airways Holdings, based in Indianapolis, Indiana, the United States, subject to the approval of the bankruptcy court. At present, Frontier Airlines is under Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection.