US airline traffic data for April is published

The Bureau of Transportation Statistics (BTS), a branch of the U.S. Department of Transportation, reported on the U.S. airlines’ systemwide scheduled service load factor for April 2015.

The systemwide load factor, which includes both domestic and international flights, measures the use of airline capacity. In April 2015, this capacity declined by 82.8 percent. This seasonally adjusted figure means shows a decrease for the second month in a row.

U.S. airlines have reported that systemwide passenger enplanements for April 2015 stand at 65.4 million, which surpasses the earlier record from March 2015 by 0.4 percent. Also in April, systemwide revenue passenger miles surpassed the record from March by 0.4 percent, reaching to 73.8 billion. Systemwide available seat miles for April 2015 were 89.1 billion, which exceeded the December 2014 record by 0.8 percent.

Unfortunately, these record-breaking increases did not show a higher load factor for the overall month of April 2015. Experts state that this is because the airline capacity growth surpassed the growth for passenger travel.

The load factor for April, which was 82.8, was a decline compared to the all-time seasonally adjusted high from January 2014, which was 84.5.