United Airlines has seemed to struggle. After a number of high profile incidents, the FAA if auditing safety practices. They’re unable to open up flights to new cities, and have had to defer already-announced service.
And winter is always a struggle to begin with. Delta barely eked out a profit. They’ve been expected to be the only U.S. carrier to do so.
United has estimated an impact of $200 million from the grounding of the Boeing 737 MAX 9. Without that they actually would have made money in the quarter. Costs were lower than expected, revenue was higher than expected and they lost $164 million which was better than last year even with the MAX 9 grounding during the quarter.
Boeing 737 Factory
Things are looking up, but they’re not able to grow like they want. Boeing production has slowed. Airbus has had its own challenges. They originally planned to inaugurate about 100 aircraft in 2024, but that’s now down significantly – to 61 narrowbodies and 5 widebodies this year.
- The Boeing 737 MAX 10 has been out of United’s fleet plans for now. It’s still not certified. They’ve converted some MAX 10s to MAX 9s for 2025 – 2027 delivery and may convert more.
- They’re leasing 35 new Airbus A321neos with CFM engines to be delivered in 2026 and 2027.
United Airlines Boeing 737 MAX 9, credit: United
Still, their overall capacity is up 9.1% year-over-year and revenue up even more at 9.7%. These results – thought perhaps just a one-off – seemingly put United closer into Delta performance than perhaps many realized. They’ve had Boeing bad luck, though they also still face challenges at their Newark hub that aren’t as severe for Delta out of other New York city airports and don’t have as strong-performing hubs as Delta’s midcontinent operations.
Gary Leff