There are more seats flying today than there were before the pandemic but flights are still below 2019 levels worldwide, and we’re certainly not back to trend.
The largest airlines in the world are in the U.S. by far, though. Although what counts as largest will give you a different answer for who takes the crown.
- Is it most flights?
- Or most planes?
- Or most seats?
- Or seat miles (flying each seat the farthest)
Airlines operated 36.4 million scheduled flights in 2024 and 5.85 billion seats worldwide, representing more travel than before the pandemic – 2% more seats than 2019, though flights were still down 5%. That’s a function of a move to larger planes, and more seats in each plane (densification). On average capacity rose to 161 seats per flight in 2024, up from 150 in 2019.
Global available seat kilometers (ASKs) climbed 8.7% year-on-year. This is the capacity growth that airlines have been complaining about in earnings calls. Of course every airline thinks they should be growing, they just don’t want other airlines growing so that they can sell more seats at higher fares. Yet globally airlines have still been filling these seats, with an over 83.5% load factor which is a record.
American Airlines led the world in scheduled seats, offering roughly 275 million seats for 2024. Delta Air Lines and United Airlines were next in line, each exceeding 200 million seats, followed by Southwest Airlines.
Four U.S. airlines led the world in seat capacity. Number 5 was European low cost carrier Ryanair. Of these, United United expanded most aggressively, growing 11% to 32.6 billion ASKs for the year.
In terms of number of flights, American’s 2.18 million flights were the most. They have a large domestic network, with Delta and United not far behind, but those carriers operate more long haul. United Airlines was the world’s largest by seat kilometers – it flies the most large planes the farthest. American came in at 296 billion ASKs and Delta at 291 billion ASKs.
Emirates produced 222 billion ASKs – off of only 71 million passengers – flying Boeing 777s and Airbus A380s an average of 4,200 miles per segment.
In contrast, Ryanair has by far the most routes – serving 239 destinations and adding 208 new routes just in 2024 – connecting 1,000 city pairs. United flies to 360 destinations (214 domestic, 146 international) and American 356. But Ryanair is low frequency, and its flights are short.
Southwest Airlines, a primarily domestic carrier, operates over 2,100 routes (serving 117 cities). It operates more distinct routes than any other carrier.
In 2024, American Airlines retained the world’s largest fleet, with over 1,550 aircraft in service (including its regional affiliates). United Airlines ended 2024 with around 1,444 total aircraft, and Delta Air Lines at 1,271.
Outside the U.S., the largest fleets belonged Ryanair (537 narrowbodies) and Air China (497). As with the U.S., there’s an extensive Chinese market, and the flights of Air China, China Southern, and China Eastern all skew domestic. No Chinese carrier was top-five in ASKs in 2024.
In contrast, neither Emirates nor Qatar Airways has a domestic market. Turkish Airlines famously flies to more countries than any other airline (over 130 countries), leveraging Istanbul’s position at the crossroads of Europe, Asia, and Africa. In 2024 Turkish served over 300 destinations across six continents. Qatar’s network spans over 160 destinations, and in 2024 it was among the top 10 globally in ASKs despite fewer than 200,000 flights.
British Airways, while smaller, also maintains service to all continents except Antarctica. The sun never sets on the British Airways empire.
Air India, now under new ownership, is poised to grow with a massive order of 470 planes. There are more people in India now than China, though the country is far poorer. Meanwhile, IndiGo (which is already #9 in the world by fleet size) has a massive order book as well.
I was listening to the Airshow episode on the Cranky Network Awards. They mentioned a statistic that I thought was so interesting:
Of UA’s international destinations, 34 are not served by any other US carrier.
Maybe Hyatt’s approach to only focusing on resorts and all-inclusives is the right strategy given the fact that clearly business travel will almost certainly never return to 2019 levels unless remote work ceases to be a thing.
The most interesting commentary here is the emphasis on Air India’s growth through privatization and new aircraft—if they can pull that off, it will be huge, because currently I would not trust them on their old 777 ever again. Yikes!
@Gary, how’s Pakistani Intl Airways looking?
Mark,
UA loves to tell you about the unique destinations it serves – and yet this year they added a bunch of narrowbody, seasonal, less than daily flights.
There simply aren’t a whole lot of opportunities for new widebody daily flights and UA doesn’t have the aircraft to add flights if they did.
UA still can’t manage to turn its massive network of far-flung destinations into a revenue advantage as much as UA execs love to talk about how much advantage they get from adding service to Mongolia and remote places in Spain.
The sooner you and they grasp the concept that ALL US airlines are for-profit businesses and delivering on the bottom line is ALL that matters, the sooner we can return to our regularly scheduled programming.
For now, UA execs and you are like the annoying tests of the emergency broadcast system that accomplish nothing for consumers except make noise and irritate people.
As for the article, DL carries more ASMs ON ITS OWN METAL than any US airline and also generates more revenue and profit – and still is the highest market cap airline in the world, although ALL US airlines have lost a lot of altitude in the past month.
and to think that some people were bent out of shape that I gave a HOLD rating on UAL; it clearly should have been a SELL.
The increase in average seat is no surprise.
Nobody wants to fly RJs, nor single aisle small planes 8 hours over an ocean (maybe even without screens for good measure). The return of the written-off but outstanding from a passenger comfort A380 shows that with a vengeance.
One thing that the pandemic reinforced is that life is short and it’s worth paying for good experiences instead of wasting it with bad ones just to save 2% or whatever.
People are booking DL instead of AA, an A350 instead of a 737. And they pay attention and do research before clicking on “buy”: never again is very much a thing that people stick to, just witness the financials of Spirit, Frontier and American.
This has more to do with the new pilot contracts where large pay raises were given.. A 737-7 NG or 737-8 max both require two pilots on a 737 pay scale, but their cost can be spread over a larger number of seats on the Max 8. It makes sense for airline to upgauge, especially as the Max 7 is still waiting for regulatory approval.
For sake of argument, say that the Captain and the First Officer both make $400 an hour and that the flight is 5 hours, door closed to door opened on the airplane. That means that the cockpit crew cost is $4,000 for the trip and we will add 25% to that for benefits so the total comes out to $5,000. If the airplane has 200 passengers, the cost for the cockpit crew averages to $25 per seat. For 150 passengers, the same situation averages $33.33 per seat. The total cost of the cabin crew is probably less than the cost of the Captain. Even though the cost per passenger isn’t too high, the airlines can make more profit on larger and newer airplanes if they can fill them to a high degree.
and specific to the related articles of why DL is so profitable and AA is not, DL was the first of the legacy carriers to figure out that increasing aircraft size -upgauging – would create levels of efficiency that go directly to the bottom line.
DL bought the ex-AirTran 717s from Southwest and used them to get rid of about 200 CRJs. Then they repeated the exercise with A220s- in 109 and 130 seat versions. and DL added hundreds of 737-900s and A321s over the past decade to increase its mainline average aircraft size.
AA and UA paid much more than DL on a system basis per seat for labor during the pandemic even though DL raised labor rates first among the big 3 because DL has fewer RJs. RJ labor rates have grown faster than mainline labor costs over the last 5 years.
UA is rapidly trying to catch up to where DL is but is using 50 passenger 2 class regional jets and 365 seat mainline 777-200s while AA has many more RJs than DL or even UA.
DL is now once again focused on an all-new aircraft which will be much more efficient than anything that is flying today.
The number of flights should lag pre-covid. The number of pax carried should continue to increase because of greater efficiency.