Seems like you have swallowed too many bitter pills the last days Auagmire85. The news about Norwegian getting bigger than SAS in three years came in a check-in.dk article. It was no quote of what Mr. Kjos has ever said. We all know journalists aren't the best in math, and this time too they didn't pass. The May passenger numbers were released from both airlines today, and with that growth difference we now see equal numbers for the two have to wait 'till September 2019. Looking at the 12 months rolling numbers, Norwegian is now 62.4% of SAS and 52.7% of SAS Group passenger wise. In other words Norwegian picks up around 0.4 percentage points on SAS per month now (average the first five months this year).
And if compare today's single aisle fleets, there is significant difference in CO2 emission. I have used the environmental calculator on the SAS website to estimate the average CO2 per passenger between Copenhagen and Oslo (2,65 kg CO2 = 1 litre jet fuel). For SAS to fly one passenger between the two cities will in average lead to 73 kg CO2. The same number for Norwegian's average passenger will be 58 kg CO2 and that equals 20% lower fuel use by Norwegian compared with SAS. For this estimate I have used 12 months rolling load factor for both SAS and Norwegian. The damp leased Cimber CRJ2s are not included in this estimate (would have increased the difference even more). This estimate is indeed conservative since I have used the load factor which also included the SAS IC fleet. The single aisle load factor is in reality a few percentage points lower (71.6 % compared with 73.4 % in May). The distance between CPH and OSL is only 518 km, and that is more an less the break even distance for the winglets start to reduce the fuel consumption. The average distance of the flights for both airlines is around twice as long as CPH-OSL. Since Norwegian has a higher share of aircraft with winglets (43 of 56), we may add a few percentage points to the difference between the fleets. All in all we may be talking about a 25% lower fuel use per passenger at Norwegian compared with SAS. This was only one factor. We can also start to talk about regularity. The difference between the two is now significant - again advantage Norwegian. Even being the most punctual now seems to be a close race. Norwegian has had 1.2% more of their flight pushing on time compared with SAS the last three months at OSL. This must really hurt for SAS since punctuality has been used as one of their top topics in their marketing efforts.