$2 Billion in Losses for Airlines

The last of the big US carriers reported earnings this morning. The bottom line: it's not a good time for the traditional carriers (though it could be worse) but there are profits to be had for the budget airlines.

First, a wrap of the latest earnings:

US Airways: a net loss of $103 million, or 90 cents a share.

JetBlue: a profit of $12 million, which it attributed to lower fuel charges.

Alaska Air: a net loss of $19.2 million, or 53 cents a share.

In all of the cases, the airlines did better than analysts expected they would do. That follows the same pattern in the past week as the other airlines reported their earnings. Besides JetBlue, the other carrier to post a profit for the quarter was AirTran.

According to Bloomberg, the latest earnings "pushed first-quarter operating losses to $2 billion for the domestic industry's 9 biggest carriers. Airlines slashed fares in an effort to win back travelers, obscuring the benefit of a 52 percent drop from a year earlier in jet fuel's average price. The combined loss was narrower than the $2.3 billion estimate by Michael Derchin, an FTN Equity Capital Markets Corp. analyst in New York. Including costs for fuel-hedge contracts at above-market rates and other accounting items, the quarterly net loss for the group was $1.84 billion."