An Airline That Made Money?

Two airlines reported first-quarter earnings today--the legacy carrier Continental and the budget carrier AirTran. One of them carries on the trend of other airlines this earnings season by posting a loss. The other does something we haven't seen lately by reporting an actual profit.

Care to guess which is which?

Alright, it's not that difficult a question if you've been keeping track of how the oldest and biggest US airlines have fared so fare this year. Houston-based Continental posted a $136 million loss for the first quarter, though it said $4 million was related to grounding some of its fleet. After that deduction, the airline's loss was $1.07 a share--better than the $1.18-$1.19 a share loss estimated by analysts for Bloomberg and Reuters, respectively. The story was the same at the other big carriers--American, United and Delta--all of whom had losses, but weren't as bad as analysts expected.

The story at AirTran is happier. Although it had a 9 percent drop in revenue, the Orlando-based budget carrier managed to pull in a $28.7 million profit, or 21 cents a share, for the first quarter. "Our ability to report a profit today is rooted in the difficult decisions we made last year. AirTran Airways was among the first airlines to react to the changing economic environment and we are among the first to show signs of recovery," chief executive Robert Fornaro said in a statement.