Originally Posted by
JonEMA
Optimistic enthusiasm perhaps, but its interesting that Eastern's load factor across its network is also around this figure and they still make money.
Sorry, but that's utterly irrelevant.
First, as Phineas points out, Eastern doesn't have a breakeven for the charter operation - they should be in profit on this by definition.
But even leaving that fundamental point aside (and imagining for a second that the commercial risk on this did lie with the airline), the economics of Eastern's business-oriented high-frequency scheduled network are a completely different kettle of fish to a once-a-week 3-hour-sector-length round-trip (with positioning flights), and the breakeven load factor on the one has really zero relation to the breakeven load factor on the other. Without knowing how the scheduled-network yield compares to the yield on this service, it's just not possible to make any meaningful comparison of breakeven load factors.