Many air travelers have already felt the crunch of overcrowding on U.S. domestic flights this past year, especially this summer where the dubious distinction of record delays and cancellations plagued hundreds of thousands of passengers. The airlines would rather use the term “right-sizing” instead of “overcrowding”, but the bottom line remains that over the past 30 months the legacy U.S. airlines have dropped capacity by over 20%. The tail end of this time frame had load factors cracking the 80% barrier (up from 60% levels a few years back) and this summer creeping up into the low 90% range…

“Right-sizing” allows the legacy airlines to be on the profitable end of the supply and demand curve as noted by the highest profits since 2000.

During my research for a recent post on historical airline flight capacity last year vs. this year on the two busiest travel days of the year (Sunday after, Wednesday before Thanksgiving), I noticed a trend related to downsizing aircraft that will have many of you looking for some leg room and those over 5′ 8″ wearing helmets…

Certainly removing seats from the daily pool fills planes up to the brim (requiring everyone to bone up on elbow etiquette) — but the trend I noticed also shows a serious shift to smaller aircraft on all but the longest transcontinental U.S. routes. It is pretty obvious the wider body aircraft are being pulled out of the U.S. and put into service on the more lucrative international routes.

Take for example the following airlines aircraft change activity in the past year within the domestic U.S.:

Northwest Airlines:

• Dropped 84 daily Airbus flights (dropped 58 daily DC-9 flights as well)
• Added 135 daily Regional Jets (Canadian Regional Jets and Embraer, 50-100 seats)

Delta Air Lines:

• Changed out over 30 daily (two aisle) 767’s and replaced with single aisle 757’s
• Dropped 27 737’s
• Added 189 daily regional jets (50 to 100 passengers, CRJ, ERJ)

Continental Airlines:

• Dropped 11 daily 737’s and 5 daily 757’s
• Added 149 CRJ, replacing 300 ERJ’s that where dropped
• Switching from prop Dash 8’s away from Beechcraft

American Airlines:

• Very small changes, did drop 60 daily Jetstream props and 14 daily 757’s

United Airlines:

• Dropped 31 daily 757’s and 11 smaller Airbus’s
• Added 20 daily CRJ’s (50-100 seats)
• Dropped 48 daily ERJ’s (Embraer 60-100 seats)

US Airways (absorbed America West’s fleet):

• Dropped 58 daily Embraer Jets
• Dropped 23 daily 737’s
• Dropped 17 daily smaller Airbus

This is only the last years worth activity, if you pile on the previous 18 months, at a more substantial rate and the fact that legacy airlines are taking little or no delivery of new wider body aircraft for domestic U.S. travel and you have the worse sort of tri-fecta for passengers on legacy airlines — less seats (higher cost), smaller aircraft (less comfortable) and older aircraft …

The ray of hope is in the low cost airlines (including the new “hybrid” entrant Virgin America) where they continue to add new planes (more capacity) — albeit at a slower rate than previous years.

The bell has rung for the smaller plane trend and it is not likely to be unrung anytime soon…