This would in turn help Delta in increasing its average occupancy rate, thereby improving the load factors.

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With good load factors, all three routes (Edinburgh, Denver and Bangalore) are sustainable.

ECONOMIST: Business travel

Seat load factors improved by more than two percentage points to 78%, even though capacity (measured by available seat kilometres) increased by a fifth.

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Similarly, airline passengers would have been far less inconvenienced in December if carriers had not been running at near-record load factors and if they had been keeping a few extra planes on hand for emergencies.

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U.S. industry requires access to places that the airlines do not serve and do not want to serve, since their business model is aimed at capturing the high-load factors that exist for travel between hub cities.

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Airline economics require high load factors.

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Axioma, a firm that provides risk models and portfolio-construction tools for stock investors, uses 10 factors for U.S. stocks, including exchange-rate sensitivity, debt load and momentum, or the tendency of a rallying stock to keep rallying.

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