United Airlines To Reduce International Capacity By 7%

This week, during their quarterly earnings report, United Airlines announced an extra 7% cut in international capacity for the last four months of the year. According to airliners.net, all UA hubs are impacted by the reduction in flights. If you have upcoming international itineraries on United, be sure to check for possible schedule changes. Below is a listing of impacted flights from San Francisco:

San Francisco (SFO) to:

London (LHR) - 2nd daily flight suspended

Tokyo/Narita (NRT) - 2nd daily flight suspended

Certain other routes are flying fewer flights during the week and/or operating smaller aircraft.

San Jose Airport Loses 1 Million Passengers

(From NBCbayarea.com)

Mineta San Jose International Airport has told San Jose city officials that passenger traffic fell by one million people in 2008. Airport officials said airline capacity reductions throughout the nation and the deep economic recession have contributed to the drop off.

The passenger traffic numbers dropped from 10.7 million in 2997 to 9.7 million in 2008. That is a 8.8 percent drop. Airport officials said December 2008 traffic fell 14 percent to 689,000, compared to 813,000 in December 2007.

That was the 15th straight month that passenger traffic had dropped compared to one year earlier, airport officials reported. Airport traffic had not been under 700,000 passengers since February, 1995.

Full story

Airline Cutbacks Arriving Soon At Oakland

Many airlines, forced to shrink capacity, are thinning routes or even dropping them entirely from their route map. Oakland Airport has been hit particularly with the downturn in the industry. The following is a recap of announced cutbacks for the next few months at Oakland International:

• American Airlines will cease Oakland operations on September 2nd. The airline has daily non-stops to its Dallas hub.
• Continental Airlines will also end operations the next day, September 3rd. It operates flights to its Houston hub.
• United Airlines, which operates daily flights to Los Angeles will end on November 2nd.
• Southwest will drop its daily non-stop to Tucson, effective November 3rd.
• Taca Airlines, operating a daily flight to San Salvador will end on September 1st.
• ExpressJet will end flights to Salt Lake City on September 1st.

Keeping Score On Capacity Cuts

In case your not keeping score at home, here is a summary of the big-name airline players and their expected cuts in capacity through the end of 2008:

-United Airlines will cut capacity system wide by 12%.
-U.S Airways by 8%.
-American Airlines by 11-12%, including ending all Oakland operations
-Delta Airlines will eliminate up to 13%
-Northwest 9.5%
-Continental 11%
-AirTran 5%
-Frontier Airlines by 17%

With the capacity cuts, many airlines will layoff or offer packages to employees, while airlines such as Midwest and AirTran are implementing pay reductions to certain staff.

Capacity cuts mean consumers can expect to dig deeper into their wallet as fares rise to meet the demand for fewer seats/less capacity.