Alaska Air reports 'best quarter ever'

Alaska Air Group reported profit increase of nearly 40% for the third quarter, which the company says was the best in its history.

Alaska Air Group -- the parent company of Alaska Airlines and sister carrier Horizon Air -- made USD 122 million in the quarter, up from USD 88 million during the same quarter a year ago.

The Associated Press writes "without special items, the profit would have been USD 118.1 million, or USD 3.21 per share. Revenue rose 10.3% to USD 1.07 billion, from USD 967.4 million a year earlier. Analysts surveyed by Thomson Reuters were expecting a profit of USD 3.11 per share on revenue of USD 1.06 billion."

"We are pleased to report our best quarter ever, with record earnings driven by higher traffic and load factors," Alaska Air CEO Bill Ayer says in a press release. "We couldn't be more proud of our people for their commitment to operating our flights safely and delivering outstanding on-time performance and customer service."

To the latter point, Air Transport World writes "Ayer noted that Alaska Airlines continued its streak of excellent on-time performance, holding the No. 1 spot in the US Dept. of Transportation's on-time performance among the 10 largest domestic airlines for 16 of the last 17 months ended August 2010."

The Seattle Times also crunches some of the airline's numbers, writing that "yield, or the amount passengers paid for each mile they flew, actually fell slightly to 13.96 cents a mile on Alaska Airlines. But occupancy, called load factor, rose 3 percentage points to 85.3%. And per-mile costs fell, too."

But perhaps the most-telling measure of Alaska Air's successful quarter might be its operating margin, or the airline's profit as a percent of it's revenue.

Terry Maxon of The Dallas Morning News crunches those numbers in the paper's Airline Biz blog.

He writes that "in third quarter 2010, Alaska Air Group was clearly the winner on operating margin at 20.3%. In other words, Alaska pocketed USD 1 in operating profits for every USD 5 in operating revenues it brought in." Check out the Airline Biz blog for Maxon's operating-margin breakdown of all the nation's largest carriers.