저가 항공사: 미국에서의 생존을 위한 투쟁: 저가 항공사들

### 미국 저가 항공사의 쇠퇴: 완벽한 폭풍
* 🛫 한때 업계를 지배했던 미국 저가 항공사들은 **2016년 이후 영업이익률이 크게 하락**하는 등 어려움을 겪고 있습니다.
* 💰 수익성 하락은 **연료비 상승, 불규칙한 운영, 수요 역학 변화** 등 여러 요인이 복합적으로 작용한 결과입니다.
* ⛽ 2022년에 연료 가격이 급등하면서 **Spirit, JetBlue, Frontier와 같은 항공사의 운영 비용이 급격히 증가**했습니다.
* 🕒 악천후와 항공 교통 관제 부족 등 불규칙한 운항으로 인해 **저비용 항공사는 높은 항공기 가동률을 유지하기가 어려웠습니다.**
* 📊 레저 여행 증가와 출장 감소로 인한 승객 수요의 변화는 **저가 항공사의 매출과 수익성에도 영향**을 미쳤습니다.
* 🔄 항공사들은 **네트워크 재편, 가격 모델 변경, 운영 조정** 등 다양한 전략을 실행하고 있습니다.
* 🔮 미국에서 저가 항공사 모델의 미래는 불확실하며, 일부에서는 **현재 시장 환경에서 장기적인 생존 가능성**에 의문을 제기하고 있습니다.
* 🎓 이 분석은 항공 업계에서 데이터 기반 의사 결정의 중요성을 강조하며, **이는 Brilliant에서 제공하는 과정과 같은 교육**을 통해 개발할 수 있는 기술입니다.

미국의 저가 항공사들은 연료비 증가, 불규칙한 운항, 팬데믹 이후의 여행 트렌드 적응의 어려움으로 인해 어려움을 겪고 있습니다.

Something strange is happening in the skies. 
Eight years ago, American low-cost carriers   were just printing money. Southwest, for example, 
pocketed 20 cents of every dollar they brought in   in operating profit. JetBlue, also 20, while 
Spirit 24, and Allegiant a colossal 30. These   are monumental profit margins for any industry, 
but especially for the airline industry. While   buoyed by rock-bottom fuel prices, the low-cost 
carriers still triumphed over the competition:   Delta’s operating margin peaked at only 19.6%, 
while United’s just 13.6%. At that time, everyone   was asking: how was it that the airlines charging 
the lowest fares were making the highest profits?  But today, eight years on, the incumbent 
legacy carriers have regained their supremacy,   and their low-cost counterparts are fighting 
for their survival. These four are down to   operating margins between 5.6% and -11.2%, while 
their legacy counterparts are back up to 8% and

10.9%—far closer to their 2015 or 2016 peaks. 
So, what happened between 2016 and today? Well,   of course, the most dramatic collapse in air 
passenger volumes in modern aviation history   due to the COVID pandemic, but finding a cause for 
budget airlines’ woes is not as simple as that.   Passenger volumes, at least in the US, have fully 
recovered, hit an all-time record in summer 2023,   and have every likelihood of doing so again in 
summer 2024. While COVID hurt low-cost carriers   just like any airline, they recovered, and then 
financial performance started to turn downward   once again, whereas their legacy counterparts 
recovered, and then continued to recover   further through today. So something strange is 
happening: people want to fly more than ever,   yet the budget airline business model in the US is 
collapsing without any obvious reason as to why.

But the airlines have to have a reason, at 
least one to give to investors. They’re public   companies, so the management team must paint 
a narrative explaining why they’re not making   money like they once did, and more importantly, 
why it’s not the executive team’s fault. Spirit,   for example, says “the competitive environment 
remains challenging due to the elevated capacity   in many of the markets we serve.” That’s 
to say: other airlines are flying too much.  Now, anecdotally, Spirit’s narrative of oversupply 
is grounded in truth. The post-COVID demand   recovery has been notably uneven between the 
industry’s two main customer segments—business   and leisure. Whereas more people are flying 
for vacation or to see family than ever,   increasingly digitized businesses are now less 
willing to fly their staff around the world for   meetings or conferences and the number of people 
traveling for work still has not reached pre-COVID

levels. Considering overall demand at records, 
that means leisure travel demand is hugely strong, so the legacy airlines that traditionally were 
more focused on serving business travelers have subtly recalibrated their networks to 
capture more leisure demand. Las Vegas, which is almost entirely a vacation destination, 
had 412,000 scheduled flights in 2023, which represents about a 10% jump compared to pre-COVID 
averages. New York’s JFK airport, meanwhile, a major business market, still saw slightly 
fewer flights in 2023 compared to pre-COVID. But at least in the case of Spirit, the 
numbers don’t wholeheartedly back up their claim of competition as the primary 
cause of their woes. On the one hand, Spirit’s load factors are down—whereas 84.7% 
of seats were filled in 2015, only 81.3% are today. That is partially the effect you’d expect 
if other airlines were dumping a lot of capacity.

into a market—there would be more overall seats, 
and therefore a smaller portion of them filled—but   passenger counts are not a fixed total—they vary 
depending on price as people decide whether to fly,   depending on how much it costs. So therefore, 
you’d expect that oversupply in a market would   also lead to lower revenue since airlines would 
lower fares in order to fill seats. But revenue   seems fine. In 2015, Spirit earned 10.08 cents 
per seat, per mile flown, and today that’s down   slightly to 9.63 after a high-water-mark of 10.44 
in 2022. While this difference is meaningful,   it just is not meaningful enough to explain 
a profit collapse of 24% margin to -7.5%.  But there’s another line in their reports 
with a far more significant change—CASM:   that’s cost per available seat-mile, or how much 
it costs the airline to operate a flight on a per

seat, per mile basis. Between 2015 and 2021, 
this fluctuated roughly around eight cents, with some marginal upward growth. But between 2021 
and 2022, the cost to transport a passenger a mile on Spirit exploded 45% higher to 11.67 cents.
This is the problem. After all, the true, technical, industry term for this grouping of 
airlines is low-cost carrier, and that “cost” refers not to the fares the public pays, but 
rather to how much the airlines themselves spend operating their flights. This often translates to 
lower fares for the public, but not always. So if a low-cost carrier loses their low operating 
cost, like Spirit clearly did, it no longer has a business model. So what happened?
Well, in Spirit’s case it’s actually pretty simple—fuel prices went up. In fact, they 
basically exploded in March 2022, and excluding

fuel from their operating cost, their cost per 
available seat mile actually declined marginally between 2021 and 2022. It’s a similar story for 
JetBlue—their cost minus fuel was just about flat. But not all airlines are in the same boat. 
Frontier’s cost per available seat mile excluding fuel still went up 17% between those two years. 
Allegiant’s 32.1%. Southwest’s a colossal 39%. So, while fuel cost increases might be a major 
explanation of the demise of the low-cost carrier model in the US, it’s far from everything.
When digging through those financial reports, beyond the complaints of rising fuel prices, 
airlines attribute their issues to one other key cause: irregular operations. Essentially: 
it’s gotten a lot harder to operate an airline on-time in the US, and when you can’t operate 
an airline on-time, you really can’t effectively

operate a low-cost carrier business model.
Prior to the pandemic, Spirit was regularly flying their aircraft around or even upward of 12 hours per day during the peak summer season—from before dawn until well into the evening, and sometimes even overnight, with the shortest possible ground time in between each flight. But these days, with plenty of demand and therefore reason to operate flights, Spirit still can’t get their daily aircraft utilization up to pre-COVID levels—it’s peaked at just 10.8 hours in 2023.
Why Spirit can’t operate as much as they used to is a little of everything. Severe weather in the US is more frequent, for example—whereas in 2000 an average of just one category four or five hurricane hit the US each year, today that average is up to over two. Spirit, and most US low-cost carriers, has a disproportionate number of its

routes to or from places like Florida—home to the 
kinds of beaches that leisure travelers seek out,   but also the geography that hurricanes 
are most likely to hit. So with hurricanes   and other severe weather more frequently 
preventing on-time operations, airlines need   more slack in the schedule to keep it on track.
Similarly, the FAA is experiencing a shortage of   air traffic controllers—since each individual is 
only able to handle a certain number of flights   at a given time, this creates delays as planes 
are prevented from taking off until there’s ATC   capacity. And this shortage has hit particularly 
hard also in Florida, meaning the impact has once   again been disproportionately felt by Spirit 
and other leisure-focused low-cost-carriers.  And the bad luck doesn’t stop there. You see, 
almost half of Spirit’s aircraft fleet is   composed of A320 NEOs specifically powered by 
Pratt and Whitney’s PW1100G engine. This is an

extremely advanced and efficient engine, which is 
why the airline acquired them in the first place,   but their manufacturer identified a potential 
flaw in some of the metal used in these   engines that could cause cracking in the turbine. 
Therefore, they’ve had to move up the timeline for   inspections on these engines, which initially 
took seven Spirit aircraft out of service,   and since then has kept an above-average number 
of the airline’s planes out of revenue service   compared to typical operations. While 
Spirit is the US low-cost operator that   relies most on this engine type, and therefore is 
experiencing the most hardship from its issues,   JetBlue and Frontier also use the PW1100G and 
therefore have also seen a revenue impact.  So with this combination of issues, airlines 
are just having to fly aircraft less to keep   operations on-time. Even with lower utilization, 
Spirit still has seen weaker on-time ratings.

over the past few years compared to pre-pandemic, 
which itself has costs—be it through compensation for canceled flights, costs of booking hotels 
for unexpected overnights, revenue loss through frustrated passengers avoiding flying the airline 
again, and more. So not only do they have to make less money by flying aircraft less, they also 
have to pay more for the impact of delays. These US low-cost carriers are all in an 
untenable state—something has to change to ensure their survival. And they each have some 
rather unique theories on how to do that. JetBlue, for example, is making some fairly drastic changes 
to their route map and schedules. In recent years, rather uniquely for a low-cost carrier, they’ve 
started long-haul flights to European destinations on narrow-body aircraft configured with a huge 
number of business-class seats. This service is going decently—reviewers are lauding its 
quality, flights are filling acceptably, and

they’re expanding to more and more destinations.
Bizarrely, though, they originally scheduled these routes as year-round, and had essentially the same seat capacity in the winter as in the summer, despite transatlantic demand in the winter being massively lower. Essentially every other transatlantic airline scales down service in the winter, so faced with increased economic pressure, JetBlue opted to start cutting certain routes down to summer-only. They’re then redistributing those aircraft to domestic routes—in particular, a few from Phoenix to the east coast, and then a New York to Vancouver and New York to San Juan route. This makes sense. One other key post-pandemic trend is that leisure travelers are now opting to pay for business class at a far higher rate than before—essentially, more people are willing to pay for luxury on vacation. Most low-cost carriers are in a tough position where they’re unable to capture this highly-profitable demand.

but while JetBlue still has most of its aircraft configured in an all-economy-class configuration, this sub-fleet of aircraft configured with business class for its longer-distance routes can be better used on domestic routes in the winter when transatlantic demand is low. In addition to this network recalibration, they’ve massively boosted service out of San Juan, Puerto Rico. This also seems smart. Puerto Rico is, of course, an American territory, but no major US airline has a hub there and so they only fly to San Juan from their mainland hubs, which works efficiently for bringing mainland tourists to Puerto Rico, but less well for the 3 million people actually living there. So JetBlue is increasingly turning San Juan into a major hub that does connect it to destinations in the mainland US, but also to destinations across Latin America like Cancun and Columbia—the places Spanish-speaking Puerto Ricans are more likely to go.

Frontier is making some even more dramatic changes: essentially, they’re bailing on the budget airline business model, at least from a passenger perspective. Out of nowhere in May 2024, they announced they were fundamentally changing their pricing model—no longer would they charge for seat assignments and carry-ons and change fees. Unlike essentially every budget airline, they’d now primarily sell bundled fares just like United, Delta, or American. From a passenger perspective, they’re now far more similar to the legacy carriers. They’ve also been subtly changing how things work behind-the-scenes. In the past, Frontier was massively operationally complex with random routes all across the country, which meant aircraft and crew would be scheduled on long, winding journeys spanning across multiple days to staff each flight—an aircraft and crew might fly from Salt Lake City to San Antonio to New Orleans to Cancun to St. Louis.

and since none of those destinations were 
Frontier hubs, with additional aircraft and crew, one delay on that sequence of journeys would lead 
to a delay on all the following flights without any easy opportunity to swap an aircraft or crew 
out to get the schedule back on track. Today, though, the airline has been opening new hubs—they 
now have thirteen across the US, and only 3.5% of flights don’t go through one of them. That means 
Frontier’s operations are now far simpler as many flights just operate as an out-and-back from 
a hub, and even if they don’t, the far higher proportion of flights hitting a hub mean there 
are far more opportunities to rectify a delay and prevent it from cascading onward to the following 
flights. A reduction in delays therefore allows the airline to improve its all-important aircraft 
utilization, which then, of course, reduces cost. Not all low-cost carriers have yet instituted such 
a dramatic series of changes, but it seems like

they’ll need to: the vultures are circling. 
Southwest, while technically operating in a niche between legacy business airlines and ultra-low cost carriers, has felt the same post-COVID squeeze as the rest of the cheap leisure airlines. At the end of the first quarter of 2024, the company announced a net loss of $231 million. For a company that went 11 years or 47 quarters without announcing a loss prior to the pandemic, the news was undeniably disappointing, something even CEO Bob Jordan was willing to concede. Now, some reasons for the company’s slow start to 2024 had little to do with what Southwest had control over at the present moment—principally the reputational damage done by the prior year’s wide-scale operational meltdown that led to over a week of disruption over the peak Christmas travel period, and the continued struggles with Boeing’s quality control of the 737-MAX. Still, Jordan articulated that he had a

plan—that Southwest would change. First, it’d stop operating out of Bellingham, Cozumel, Houston, and Syracuse, while also reducing capacity out of Atlanta and Chicago. While relatively minor airports in Bellingham, Cozumel, and Syracuse, it was the first time the company had entirely entirely dropped service to specific markets since 2019. The other changes: the company would slow hiring to cull about 2,000 employees and, most radically, it would begin looking into how the company seats and boards—potentially moving away from its no-assigned-seats model to offer perks for an upcharge. And these changes were on top of a few more tweaks Southwest had made in the month of March that actually helped turn the end of the quarter to a more manageable crisis. They flew less midweek, they reduced short-haul business market flights, they

ran fewer flights outside peak hours of the day.
But to some, this just wasn’t enough. In early June, Elliott Investment management bought a $1.9 billion dollar stake in the airline, and with roughly an 11% claim to its equity, they wanted to make more substantial moves. This sent shockwaves, because not only is Elliott massive, for the leadership of publicly-traded companies, it’s frightening, as Forbes called Paul Singer—Elliott’s founder—Wall Street’s most feared Activist investor. To incumbent CEOs and board members, the term activist investor is a bit of a euphemism. Usually the strategy is simple: the investor buys a significant minority share and begins work to boost the value of their shares by pressuring the company to change. Once they have a foot in the door, the fund can then lobby leadership or stakeholders to adopt their strategy, which can vary from altering simple business

approaches to fundamentally restructuring company leadership. In this particular case, however, Southwest had now been boarded by Elliott, a firm not known for having the lightest of touch. While limited on airline experience, Elliott is notorious for the ruthless restructuring of the high-profile companies it enters, from Barnes & Noble and Cabelas to AT&T, Athenahealth, and even the Italian soccer club AC Milan. And like the infamous firm has done with so many companies before, the activist investor started its tenure with Southwest by pushing to oust its leadership. In a slide deck published to its website that effectively acts as the company’s public playbook, Elliott pulled a quite specific quote by Herb Kelleher, Southwest’s founder, early on, then outlined its way forward: change up the board, freshen up the leadership. In the move’s wake, Bob Jordan announced he wouldn’t step down under the pressure. But pressure only continued to mount

after the company filed an 8-K form with the 
SEC, that the company’s revenue per available   seat mile, or RASM, was now expected to drop 4 
to 4.5%, rather than the 1.5-3.5% it had projected   earlier. Announcing an even steeper decline in 
a key indicator for an airline’s health has only   furthered Elliott’s case for radical change.
While the shakeup is still in its early stages,   and it's unclear whether Elliot will be successful 
in their mission, what is clear is that change is   coming for Southwest, and low-cost carriers like 
it—whether initiated internally or externally.   Much has been made of Elliott’s investment into 
the airline—experts have warned that the firm’s   focus on short-term gains may harm the company’s 
long-term future. Industry insiders have pointed   out that Elliott may fundamentally misunderstand 
what’s made Southwest Southwest for the past five

decades. But what all can seemingly agree on is 
that the company has been slow to change for too long. And in a current environment so unfriendly 
to low-cost and ultra-low-cost carriers, for those in C-suite positions, it’s time 
to adapt or start updating the resume. There is a genuine question to be asked as 
to whether the low-cost carrier business model is viable long-term in the US. It thrives in 
Europe, but Europe is far more densely populated, meaning people don’t tend to travel as physically 
far from home for vacation or business. The US is vast—cities are far, far apart—and the fundamental 
basis of the low-cost carrier business model is to find ways to optimize and reduce operating costs 
relative to the legacy carriers. Carriers can do this by minimizing time on the ground, flying to 
secondary airports, paying their employees less, packing in seats more densely, but what they can’t 
do is pay less for fuel. Fuel costs what fuel

costs, and so Spirit is paying just about as much as United to buy the fuel to fly from New York to LA. But with such a long, five-hour flight, that fuel cost represents a far higher proportion of overall costs, meaning the other costs, that they could minimize, represent a smaller portion. So today, in 2024, there’s a perfect storm of higher fuel costs meeting a collection of outside factors making it harder for low-cost carriers to optimize costs overall. Essentially, low-cost carriers just can’t be low-cost in the US anymore, and without that, well, what are they? As you can tell so well by this video, a ton of the job of running an airline is about looking at big sets of numbers and analyzing what they tell you about what’s happening in the real world. The skill is tremendously useful in day-to-day life since it allows you to make conclusions about

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Why Budget Airlines are Suddenly Failing

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저비용 항공사의 변동하는 운명

8년 전만 해도 미국 저가 항공사의 수익성은 엄청나게 높았지만 오늘날에는 생존을 위해 고군분투하고 있습니다.

코로나19 팬데믹으로 인한 항공 승객 수 감소는 처음에는 모든 항공사에 타격을 주었지만, 저가 항공사의 재무 성과는 다시 하락하기 시작했고 기존 항공사는 회복세를 이어갔습니다.

저가 항공사의 어려움은 레저와 비즈니스 여행 간의 고르지 않은 수요 회복, 더 많은 레저 수요를 확보하기 위한 기존 항공사의 미묘한 네트워크 재조정 등 여러 요인이 복합적으로 작용한 결과라고 할 수 있습니다.

연료 가격 상승이 저비용 항공사에 미치는 영향

스피릿 항공은 2021년부터 2022년까지 마일당 승객 운송 비용이 45% 증가하여 수익률이 크게 하락했습니다.

이러한 비용 급증은 주로 연료 가격의 급격한 상승으로 인해 저비용 항공사 비즈니스 모델이 붕괴된 데 따른 것입니다.

이 항공사는 다른 항공사들과 함께 불규칙한 운항과 정시 운항 유지의 어려움도 미국의 잦은 악천후로 인해 더욱 악화되었다는 점도 어려움을 겪은 원인으로 꼽았습니다.

미국 저비용 항공사가 직면한 과제

허리케인과 악천후로 인해 항공사의 정시 운항 문제가 발생하고 있으며, 특히 플로리다 지역 항공사에 큰 영향을 미치고 있습니다.

항공 교통 관제사 부족도 항공편 지연의 원인으로 작용하고 있으며, 미국 연방항공청은 관제사 수용 인원을 맞추기 위해 고심하고 있습니다.

고급 PW1100G 엔진의 사용으로 인해 Spirit, JetBlue, Frontier와 같은 저비용 항공사의 매출 손실과 운영 차질이 발생하고 있으며, 이는 정시율 감소와 비용 증가로 이어지고 있습니다.

또한, 젯블루는 증가하는 럭셔리 여행 수요를 충족하기 위해 비즈니스 클래스 좌석이 많은 장거리 항공편에 초점을 맞춰 노선 지도와 스케줄을 대폭 변경하는 등 팬데믹 이후 독특한 도전에 직면하고 있습니다.

미국 주요 항공사의 비즈니스 전략 변화

젯블루는 대서양 횡단 수요가 적은 기간 동안 비즈니스 클래스로 구성된 항공기를 국내 노선에 투입하는 방안을 검토하고 있습니다.

이 항공사는 또한 푸에르토리코 산후안에서 미국 본토 및 라틴 아메리카 목적지와 연결하기 위해 서비스 확장하고 있습니다.

한편, 프론티어는 저가 항공사 모델에서 벗어나 추가 수수료를 없애고 기존 항공사와 유사한 가격 모델을 채택하고 있습니다.

또한 새로운 허브를 설립하고, 지연을 줄이고, 항공기 활용도를 개선하여 운영을 간소화했습니다.

2024년에 상당한 재정적 손실에 직면한 사우스웨스트는 팬데믹의 여파, 운영상의 어려움, 보잉의 737-MAX 문제 등에 대처하고 있습니다.

사우스웨스트, 엘리엇의 투자로 큰 변화에 직면하다

사우스웨스트항공은 엘리엇 매니지먼트의 19억 달러 투자에 대응하여 일부 공항의 서비스를 축소하고 직원을 감축하며 좌석 모델을 변경하는 등 상당한 변화를 꾀하고 있습니다.

공격적인 구조조정 전략으로 유명한 엘리엇 매니지먼트는 경영진 교체와 사우스웨스트의 새로운 방향을 추진하고 있습니다.

항공사의 장기적인 안정성에 잠재적인 영향을 미칠 수 있는 내부 및 외부의 변화 압력을 헤쳐나가는 과정에서 항공사의 미래는 불확실합니다.

저비용 항공사 비즈니스 모델은 연료비 상승 및 기타 외부 요인으로 인한 퍼펙트 스톰으로 인해 광활하고 지리적으로 분산된 미국에서 생존을 유지하기 위해 고군분투하고 있습니다.

이로 인해 항공사들은 비용 최적화가 어려워지고 있으며, 이는 미국 저가 항공사의 미래를 위협할 가능성이 있습니다.

이러한 상황으로 인해 업계 리더들은 변화하는 환경에 적응하거나 불확실한 경력 전망에 직면하고 있습니다.