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Hawaiian Airlines flew 45% fewer passsengers this March, which dragged down first quarter

CINDY ELLEN RUSSELL / CRUSSELL@STARADVERTISER.COM
                                Hawaiian Airlines airplanes at the Daniel K. Inouye International Airport on Monday.
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CINDY ELLEN RUSSELL / CRUSSELL@STARADVERTISER.COM

Hawaiian Airlines airplanes at the Daniel K. Inouye International Airport on Monday.

Hawaiian Airlines reported today that passenger traffic plummeted more than 45% in March amid declining travel demand from COVID-19 fears and containment policies.

The carrier said demand began dropping in late January when the U.S. government imposed restrictions on Chinese arrivals and the losses accelerated in mid-March after governments in Australia, New Zealand, Tahiti, American Samoa and Hawaii implemented self-isolation or quarantine policies for incoming arrivals. So, far, it’s cut system-wide service by 95% through April.

The state’s largest carrier transported 542,456 passengers this March as compared to 993,548 passengers in March of 2019. Hawaiian’s March load factor — the share of seats filled — decreased by 28.4 percentage points to 58%.

March revenue passenger miles — or the number of paying passengers multiplied by the distance traveled— decreased by nearly 41% to more than 851 million. Available seat miles, or the number of available seats multiplied by the number of miles a plane is scheduled to fly for a given flight, were down nearly 12% to nearly 1.5 billion.

March results dragged down Hawaii’s first quarter. Hawaiian carried 2,362,196 first-quarter passengers — a more than 16% decrease compared with the first quarter of 2019. During the same period, Hawaiian’s load factor fell 10.5 percentage points to 74.6%.

During the first quarter, revenue passenger miles fell 10% to more than 3.7 billion. Available seat miles during the same period rose 2.6% to more than 4.9 billion.

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