There are dominant airlines in nearly every airport in the US, even those that are the most competitive. You have Delta at LaGuardia and JFK, United at Newark and Chicago/O’Hare, Alaska in Seattle, and the list goes on. But there is one airport that nobody has ever been able to conquer, and that’s Los Angeles International Airport (LAX). I haven’t seen a direct statement supporting this, but a lot of people are now talking about how Delta is going to make a run at LAX again. History suggests it won’t work.
Before I dive into this, I want to be very clear about the scope. I am talking about dominating one airport, LAX. If you include the entire LA Basin, then that is a whole different discussion. Southwest dominates every airport other than LAX, and so you can argue it is the airline that provides the most utility to the region as a whole, at least domestically. But all of those airports are regionally-focused. LAX is and has for decades been the one airport in the region that acts as a global hub.
I’ve recently started playing with a tool called SkyGo that has OAG schedule data back to 1980. So I was able to really go back in time here and watch the evolution of this airport. Back then, United was the biggest airline at LAX. If we exclude commuters, Western was next with PSA close behind. American was a step further, and Delta was basically nothing.
1980 LAX Route Maps OAG data via SkyGo, generated by the Great Circle Mapper® – copyright © Karl L. Swartz.
Back then, the airlines were still coming out of deregulation and trying to figure out their positioning. Historically, American flew people from LAX to the east/northeast while Delta took (very few of) them to the east/southeast. But United not only did east-west, it also flew a lot of north-south. Western did intrawest flying as well from its home at LAX, and PSA was the young buck who went almost entirely north-south. This remained the status quo until 1984 when Air Cal started challenging PSA at LAX, having more departures than American after that year.
Up until the mid-1980s, however, it was United, Western, and PSA who led the pack and then the mergers started. In 1987, Western schedules were absorbed by Delta, AirCal went into American, and PSA was folded into USAir in 1988. United picked up Pan Am’s Pacific routes shortly before that as well.
By the end of the decade, Delta had become the largest airline at LAX thanks to its acquisition of Western, followed by American with AirCal, and then United. Those three would maintain their hold on the top three spots from then on.
Starting in 1990, I can look at T-100 data via Cirium which then gives us a more accurate look at seats and seat share. But I went deeper than that. I looked at seats for Alaska, American, Delta, Southwest, and United including regional partners departing LAX. This also includes joint venture partners but only in the years when they were part of the joint venture. Here’s what you get.
LAX Departing Seats by Airline Group
T-100 Data via Cirium
This chart tells us quite the story. What we see is that in the early 1990s, Delta was retrenching a bit, pulling down frequencies in some markets while standing pat in others. But United, well, United started growing fast. I believe it was 1997 when SkyWest moved its Delta flying to United instead, further cementing United’s historical position. American also made a run in the late 1990s through acquisitions, so as they both grew, Delta lost seat share. That lasted for 15+ years until Delta bought Northwest and began to focus on LAX.
American, meanwhile, didn’t really grow much on its own. It was all about acquisitions. It took Reno Air in 1999, TWA soon after, and then US Airways in 2015. That final merger brought the strategic decision to open a Transpacific hub at LAX which was when American first made a real run at LAX through organic growth. All of this pushed American into the top spot right up until the pandemic. That’s when things changed dramatically.
What we see during the pandemic is that American pulled back a lot. It did get rid of its Transpacific hub idea, but it wasn’t just about those long-haul flights. Meanwhile, after years of decline, United realized it wanted to get back into the game. So it did, and it has increased share ever since. Delta has just continued to grow into the number one position.
We haven’t even talked about Alaska and Southwest yet. Alaska was up in the 5 percent range until it took over Virgin America. It gave much of that back during the pandemic. Southwest, meanwhile, had been slowly declining for a decade before the pandemic hit. That trend hasn’t changed. The only reason those two airlines matter is to show that not all of Delta’s and United’s gains have been at the expense of American.
But let’s look at this a different way. We’ve been talking about seats up until now, but that doesn’t really tell us how well the airline is doing at capturing the local market. Instead for that, we’ll look at DB1B/C data through the end of 2025, though keep in mind this is only for domestic travel.
LAX Local Domestic Passengers by Airline
DB1B/C OD Data via Cirium
This looks at itineraries, so it takes away those who are connecting at LAX to find those who are starting or ending their trips there. There are some things that look very different here.
First of all, American’s fall looks much more precipitous from this angle during the pandemic. Keep in mind that getting rid of all those international flights won’t even show up here. But when American backed off, it lost a lot of ground domestically as well. This is the “s-curve” at work; when American reduced its utility, people moved in greater numbers to other airlines that had more utility in the overall market.
Unlike in terms of seats, however, American is still ahead of United, though barely. United’s gain in local traffic is much less than its gain in seats. It has to fight Delta for those local travelers, and Delta just keeps going up.
It’s also fairly remarkable to see that Southwest was the largest in the domestic market from LAX for many years. It is now a distant number four, and it probably isn’t planning on trying to compete for that title again.
In the end, other than a brief blip around the turn of the century, nobody has been above 25 percent share in the domestic market, and that’s the point. LAX doesn’t want one airline to dominate. Airlines have tried to make runs, but they never seem to last. Inevitably they all jockey for position and then end up somewhere in the pack. There has been no winning in this market, but… could that change?
In my next post, I’m going to look at why this might be a good time for Delta to try.
