Fourth-quarter 2023 earnings will start to arrive this week, and one early filer is Delta Air Lines ($DAL), which will announce earnings on Jan. 12. That gives us an excellent opportunity to remind everyone of Calcbench’s ability to study earnings data in detail, using airlines as the example.

Earlier this year we cooked up a template to study earnings and key performance metrics in the airline industry. The template is a spreadsheet that Calcbench subscribers can use to track numerous disclosures that matter in the airline sector, including:

• RASM, or revenue per available seat mile
• CASM, costs per available seat mile
• Load factor, which is the percentage of seating capacity filled by customers
• Fuel consumed
• Average fuel cost per gallon
• Percentage of revenue coming from passengers
• EPS

Calcbench has been using this template internally for a while now, such as when we looked at fuel costs for five major airlines last October or when we looked at RASM for those same five airlines last July. 

In anticipation of Q4 earnings, which should arrive from all the majors over the next three weeks, we used our template to look at RASM yet again for major airlines: Delta, American Airlines (AAL), United Airlines (UAL), Alaska Airlines (ALK), JetBlue (JBLU) and Southwest (LUV). See Figure 1, below.

Delta, in green, has been pulling away from its competitors for a while now. That’s also what the data told us last July, and we’ll be curious to see whether the pattern continues in Q4 results. 

On the other hand, how neatly does high RASM translate into EPS performance? Perhaps not all that much. Figure 2, below, compares quarterly EPS, and if you can see a clear outlier in those numbers, your analytical eyesight is better than ours; these results are all over the map.

So how can you take advantage of our airlines analysis template? Follow these simple steps.

1. Be a Calcbench professional-level subscriber. 
2. Install the Calcbench Excel Add-In. 
3. Download our template from DropBox.
4. That’s it, really. As Q4 data arrives, it will automatically populate in the template and your analysis is as current as can be.

Calcbench fans who are not professional-level subscribers can still download the template, but you’ll need to enter the data manually. You can inquire about professional subscriptions by emailing us at info@calcbench.com.  Our larger point is that if you want in-depth analysis to understand how companies and industrial sectors are really performing, you need in-depth data such as RASM, load capacity, fuel costs, and more. Calcbench has that data. Today’s example looks at the airlines, but whatever industry you follow — we’ve got the in-depth data for it!