Estimating Airline Employment: The Impact Of The 9-11 Terrorist Attacks

Abstract

In the calendar year prior to the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, U. S. Airlines employed 732,049 people according to the Bureau of Transportation Statistics [BTS] of the U. S. Department of Transportation (Bureau of Transportation Statistics, U. S. Department of Transportation [BTS], 2001). Since the 9-11 attacks there have been numerous press reports concerning airline layoffs, especially at the "traditional," long-time airlines such as American, Delta, Northwest, United and US Airways. BTS figures also show that there has been a drop in U. S. Airline employment when comparing the figures at the end of the calendar year 2000 (732,049 employees) to the figures at the end of calendar year 2002 (642,797 employees) the first full year following the terrorist attacks (BTS, 2003). This change from 2000 to 2002 represents a total reduction of 89,252 employees. However, prior research by NewMyer, Kaps and Owens (2003) indicates that BTS figures do not necessarily represent the complete airline industry  employment picture. Therefore, one key purpose of this research was to examine the scope of the post 9-11 attack airline employment change in light of all available sources. This first portion of the research compared a number of different data sources for airline employment data. A second purpose of the study will be to provide airline industry employment totals for both 2000 and 2002, if different from the BTS figures, and report those. Finally, the third purpose of the study was to report any variations from the overall airline industry trend. A literature review was used to complete this study. Sources used in this study included government documents, government web resources, published articles, aviation industry publications and various non-government web resources such as airline websites. Among the key conclusions of the study were the following: (1) Paralleling earlier studies, it was found that the BTS data underreported the total U. S. airline employment total by at least 61,005 employees in 2000 and 61,359 employees in 2002; (2) Utilizing a combination of BTS and World Aviation Directory (Jackman, F., 2000 and 2002) airline employment data, it was found that U. S. airline employment totals dropped by 88,898 employees or 12.5% when comparing the 2000 data with the 2002 data; (3) Low cost carriers including AirTran, Frontier, JetBlue and Southwest combined to add 9,440 employees in the same 2000 to 2002 period, an addition of 25.4 percent.