After weeks of seat cutback announcements early this summer, I did a quick study in early August on the effect these seat cutbacks would have for Christmas and figured it was time to revisit the numbers as of early October to see what might have changed.

It appears that there are some signficant changes (182,000 lost seats 2 months ago) and 212,000 lost seats now (per day) as the schedules have changed the past 2 months (30,000 more lost seats in 2 months — with over 70 million lost seats projected for 2009).

To put this into perspective we are losing over 10 years of domestic aviation growth in the U.S. by the end of the year.

I should note that these numbers do not include those seats lost by failed airlines — although Hawaiian has picked up some of the Aloha slack. Typically Christmas holiday travel also adds some seats in popular seasonal markets like ski destinations and also snow bird routes to Florida. The numbers are generated from our historical flight schedules database (source data OAG) and looking at the schedules as they existed in early October for travel the Friday before Christmas (daily seats) for 2007 and 2008. These numbers are for a typical high volume day and would’nt reflect the same numbers for weekend or midweek days (would be lower).

Given that jetBlue and Hawaiian (outside of relative newcomer Virgin America) have had the smallest cut in capacity –I decided to drill down deeper into those airlines cities: