American Airlines’ Revenue Passenger Miles (2016-2022)

This statistic highlights American Airlines’ Revenue Passenger Miles, reported on a quarterly basis from Q1 2016 onwards.

American Airlines is an American company operating scheduled air transportation in the U.S and across the world. The company is a subsidiary of the AMR group. They are headquartered at Fort Worth, Texas. It is one of the world’s largest airlines in terms of fleet size, passengers carried, and revenue passenger mile. The company along with its regional partners operates a vast domestic and international network with almost 6,700 flights per day to more than 300 destinations across the globe. The company’s operations are carried out on two fronts – mainline and regional. The mainline segment forms the major part of the company’s operations. Regional service is operated by independent and subsidiary carriers under the brand name American Eagle.

Passenger revenue is the main source of revenue for airlines. The airlines also provide cargo services, but that accounts for just a minimal portion of the company’s revenue. More than 90% of the total revenue comes from passenger airline operations and cargo making up only 2%. The company’s revenue increased to $42.01 billion in 2019 from $40.68 in the previous year. Passenger revenue for the year was around $41.98 billion.

Revenue passenger miles  (RPM) is a metric used in the transportation industry especially air transport and shows the number of miles traveled by paying passengers. It is obtained by multiplying the number of paying passengers by the distance traveled by them.

As of the first quarter of 2016, the revenue passenger miles for the airlines was 51.77 billion miles and then increased to 58.34 billion miles in the second quarter, 59.92 billion miles in the third quarter and 53.45 billion miles in the last quarter.

The RPM declined in the first quarter of 2017 to 50.98 billion miles before increasing to 59.56 billion miles in the second quarter, 60.47 billion miles in the third quarter, and 55.33 billion miles in the fourth quarter.

The RPM continued to increase going into 2018 and went up to 42.95 billion miles in the first quarter, 60.78 billion miles in the second quarter, 61.69 billion miles in the third quarter, and 55.57 billion miles in the last quarter of the year.

And the RPM shot up in 2019  and increased exponentially to 54.80 billion miles in the first quarter, 62.66 billion miles in the second quarter, 64.87 billion miles in the third quarter, and 58.92 billion miles by the end of the year.

The revenue passenger miles for American Airlines has seen steady growth year on year as well as quarter on quarter. The RPM increased from 223.48 billion miles in 2016 to 226.34 billion miles in 2017 to 230.99 billion miles in 2018 and to 241.25 billion miles in 2019, registering a growth of about 8% over the last four years.

This increase in RPM is about to take a huge hit in 2020 due to the halt in air travel operations. We can only hope that the pandemic situation eases out and air travel is allowed to resume without restrictions for the financial year of 2021.

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