While most of the world’s airlines weather recession by hunkering down, trimming capacity to cut costs and deal with slackening demand, there are those that have a somewhat different strategy. Spot the odd ones out in this Bernstein chart.

That’s Irish low-cost carrier Ryanair (FR) in the far upper right-hand side, along with Emirates (EK).

The other carriers – British Airways (BA), Air France-KLM (AF), Lufthansa (LH), Iberia (IB), Virgin Atlantic (VS), EasyJet (U2) and SAS (SK) are all in the lower left-hand quadrant, cutting capacity and experiencing negative traffic growth, according to Bernstein. Globally, there are just three other major airlines besides Ryanair and Emirates who are growing traffic and have said they plan to expand, Bernstein says. They are China Eastern, LAN Airlines and WestJet.

Still, the vast majority of the world’s carriers are planning capacity cuts, which of course, doesn’t bode well for aircraft manufacturers like Boeing and Airbus.

Related links:
Flying forces – FT Alphaville
Flying like it’s 1991 – FT Alphaville

This entry was posted by Tracy Alloway on Thursday, March 26th, 2009 at 9:50 and is filed under Capital markets. Tagged with aerospace, Airbus, airlines, British Airways, eads, easyjet, Emirates, ryanair, Virgin Atlantic. Edit this entry.