The Department of Transportation (DOT) has released Q2 2025 financial statements, so this is our first chance to look at private airlines that don’t have to publicly release results on their own. In other words, we can finally see how Avelo and Breeze did during the peak Q2 of this year.

Both airlines made big strides, but Breeze made the biggest. It finally achieved a net profit for the first time. This was also the second time it made an operating profit after Q4 of last year. I’m told there weren’t any major special items buried in the data in Q2, so this looks to be an honest-to-goodness real profit. Congrats to Breeze for pulling that off in the face of continued torrid growth.

Breeze Profit and Revenue Over Time

^{Form 41 Data via Cirium}

And then there’s Avelo which rebounded from its absolutely horrendous Q1 to something not as terribly frightening but still significantly worse than Q2 of last year. According to CEO Andrew Levy, there were $3.4 million in one-time expenses, so that would give it a -0.7 percent operating margin if we back that out. Still, it lost money and that is worse than what happened last year.

I’ve put the chart for Avelo together on the same scale as Breeze, so you can see just how different growth trajectories are. It should be easier to make a profit when you’re Avelo growing very slowly compared to Breeze, but that’s not what happened this quarter.

Avelo Profit and Revenue Over Time

^{Form 41 Data via Cirium, only shows quarters after Avelo switched from semi-annual reporting}

This, of course, is top line data, and we still don’t have DB1B data out yet to see how things are going on a route-specific level. But we can do some math to make some assumptions here.

First of all, looking at stage length-adjusted unit revenue, I show Breeze with a massive 28 percent premium over Avelo. I excluded charter revenue for this, but it includes all reported ancillaries. That is just incredible, especially since Breeze is growing so fast and Avelo is not. How fast?

Avelo and Breeze ASMs by Quarter

^{Data via Cirium}

Yes, Breeze has kept its foot on the gas with growth, and usually new routes do worse. So if Breeze is getting that kind of unit revenue premium over Avelo, either something is going very right for them or something is going terribly wrong for Avelo. (Or more likely, it’s some of both.) Right?

Well, not so fast. See, Breeze may be growing really fast, but Avelo is far less likely to stick it out in markets. Of Breeze’s capacity in Q2 2025, about 21 percent was on a route that did not operate in Q2 2024. For Avelo, however, it was 29 percent. Put another way, Breeze exited 14 of the 180 markets it flew in Q2 2024, just under 8 percent. Avelo, however, exited 18 of the 74 markets it flew in Q2 204, more than 24 percent.

In short, there is a lot of churn at Avelo whereas Breeze has a little, but it’s mostly just rapid growth for that airline. Breeze’s strategy is more sustainable in that it suggests it has found routes that work and keeps adding. Meanwhile, Avelo is still searching for what’s going to work. With the entire West Coast being dropped this year, that means it will once again have significant change by the time Q2 2026 rolls around.

But what about load factor, yous ay? Breeze had a 78.7 percent load factor versus Avelo’s 75.6 percent. But that is in no way enough to close the gap. Even with the same load factor, Breeze’s unit revenue would still be more than 20 percent higher. I guess all those extra legroom and First Class seats actually do make sense… go figure.

On the other side of the equation, Breeze does have a smaller airplane with the A220 versus Avelo’s mix of a few slightly larger B737-700s and more much larger B737-800s. You would expect Breeze’s unit costs to be higher, and I do show them stage length-adjusted at about 11 percent above Avelo. But that just doesn’t matter as much when your revenues are able to support those higher costs.

In the end, Breeze seems to be on a decent path. It is not going to light the world on fire with those margins, but it seems to be on to a consistent strategy that might actually deliver if the airline would just slow down its growth for a minute. Meanwhile, Avelo continues to search for a strategy beyond New Haven that will stick. Maybe it’s one of the Wilmingtons or perhaps Charlotte/Concord. Time will tell.