BTS 13-17 Thursday, March 16, 2017 Contact: Dave Smallen Tel: 202-366-5568 BTS Statistics Release: 2016 Annual and December U.S. Airline Traffic Data
The U.S. Department of Transportation's Bureau of Transportation Statistics (BTS) reported today that U.S. airlines carried an all-time high number of passengers in 2016 – 823.0 million systemwide, 719.0 million domestic and 103.9 million international – surpassing the previous highs reached in 2015.
The airlines also set all-time annual highs for systemwide, domestic and international revenue passenger miles (RPMs) and available seat-miles (ASMs).
Although passenger trips handled by airlines reached an all-time high in 2016 there were more empty seats available because airlines expanded capacity at an even greater rate. Load factor – the measure of the use of airline capacity – declined from previous years.
The annual load factor declined from 2015 (83.8) to 2016 (83.4) because system capacity grew faster (3.9 percent increase in ASMs) than the growth in passenger travel (3.5 percent increase in RPMs).
See Air Traffic Release for annual and monthly trends, both seasonally-adjusted and unadjusted, summary tables and additional data. Additional traffic data can be found on the BTS Airlines and Airports page. Click on a link in the Quick Links box on the right. See Load factor, RPMs, ASMs and Passengers. For more historical data, see Traffic on the BTS website. See Seasonal Adjustment for methodology and additional explanation. See data for airline data since 2000 as well as seasonally-adjusted data for rail, transit, pipelines, trucking and waterways.
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BTS Statistics Release: 2016 Annual and December U.S. Airline Traffic Data
