How many passengers are carried by US airlines each year?
Who are the top 20 airlines and how many passengers do they carry each?
How many bags do they lose or mishandle each year?  By misyhandle this
means any bag which is lost, delayed, has an item stolen from it or is
damaged.

The most reliable data on airline transportation statistics are
available by the Bureau of Transportation Statistics (BTS).
The total amount of passengers carried by US airlines for 2004 and 2005:

Jan-Oct. 2004 passengers: 529,582,175
Jan-Oct. 2005 passengers: 554,053,210

The top 10 airline rankings in numbers of passengers are:

Rank   Airline         Jan-Oct 2005      Jan-Oct 2005

1      Southwest       73,763,408        67,854,148  
2      Delta           66,322,374        66,232,032  
3      American        64,540,045        60,704,637  
4      United          46,086,115        50,692,556  
5      Northwest       39,681,204        38,343,765  
6      US Airways      31,867,507        31,555,223  
7      Continental     27,232,421        26,202,750  
8      America West    17,492,550        16,819,838  
9      American Eagle  13,970,440        11,893,071  
10     AirTran         13,586,401        10,747,418  

from: Bureau of Transportation Statistics, T-100 Domestic Market
( http://www.bts.gov/press_releases/2006/bts002_06/html/bts002_06.html )
Top 20 airline data is not available. 

Mishandled baggage 

"The U.S. carriers reporting flight delay and mishandled baggage data
posted a mishandled baggage
rate of 5.00 reports per 1,000 passengers in November, higher than
both November 2004?s 4.53 rate
and October 2005?s 4.90 mark."

from:
( http://www.bts.gov/press_releases/2006/dot001_06/html/dot001_06.html )

"For the year, mishandled luggage reports rose from 4.19 per 1,000
passengers in 2003 to 4.91 in
2004."
from:
Air Traffic Control Association
( http://www.atca.org/singlenews.asp?item_ID=2286&comm=0 )

The rate of mishandled baggage given above is an average value for all
carriers, still all other
data I found in the research are very similar. 


I hope this solves your problem. If you need any further assistance
please post a request for
clarification.

till-ga


Search strategy:
( ://www.google.de/search?sourceid=navclient&hl=de&ie=UTF-8&rls=DVXA,DVXA:2005-05,DVXA:de&q=airlines+statistics+united+states
)
and
( ://www.google.de/search?sourceid=navclient&hl=de&ie=UTF-8&rls=DVXA,DVXA:2005-05,DVXA:de&q=airlines+statistics+united+states+mishandled+luggage
)

---

Request for Answer Clarification by idoink-ga on 17 Jan 2006 03:34 PST

Is there any defintion of what the mishandled figure includes?  i.e.
does it include lost, delayed, has an item stolen from it or is
damaged or is it just lost and delayed or a combination of the four categories?

---

Clarification of Answer by till-ga on 17 Jan 2006 04:08 PST

The given figures are a combination of the four categories, although
searching very hard I could not find any reliable source with figures
for each category.

till-ga