A surprisingly good graphic from the New York Times today shows what’s happened to the airline industry since deregulation in 78, with each bar representing the total percentage of passengers in the US. Currently, Southwest seems to have the slight lead with 17%, while classics like American Airlines have dropped down to 12.2%.
The deregulation of the airline industry in 1978 led to a wave of mergers that continues to this day. But even as the legacy carriers have been consolidating and growing, they have been losing market share to low-cost carriers. Two of them, SouthWest and AirTran, have just agreed to merge and carried the most passengers in 2009 combined.
It’s a great representation, the “growing bars” do a great job of not only representing the information, but symbolizing the growth of the companies in a quick overview as well.
