Whats the combined revenue? AA alone is up by around $8 billion since 2002
No easy answer to that one becuse there was only one full quarter of revenues that included TWA, LLC prior to September 11, which caused revenues to completely tank, making comparisons less than useful (IMO). Yes, revenues are greatly improved over 2002 and 2003 when the revenues were billions short of covering the expenses. That's like running a race against someone whose legs were just amputated and then bragging about your margin of victory. More useful, IMO, is to compare the revenues from 2001 before the legs were amputated, which I'll do below. It's not exact science, of course, but a reasonable approximation.
That said, the best one, IMO, is to take the first two quarters of 2001 and double them to get a pro forma sense of what the revenues would have likely been but for Osama bin Laden and his friends' effects on revenues.
AA's total revenues for the first six months of 2001, which included TWA revenues from April 10 thru June 30, were $10.343 billion. If we double that, the 2001 revenues should have been at least $20.7 billion. That's a conservative estimate because the first half number didn't include TWA revenues from Jan 1 thru April 9. LLC's revenues from 4/10 thru 6/30 were $671 million, so a fair estimate of the first quarter might be $600 million, and if that is added to the actual $10.343 billion, the first half would have been $10.943 billion and a reasonable estimate of the full year 2001 would be $21.9 billion.
The actual total revenues for 2001, thanks to the terrorists, ended up at $18.963 billion instead of the likely $21.9 billion that those 905 planes and 115,000 employees would have generated. As you pointed out, 2002 was substantially worse since there weren't eight normal revenue months like there had been in 2001 (prior to the terrorist attacks).
2012 total revenues were $24.855 billion, highest in AMR's history, and $3 billion more than the pro-forma estimate of a terrorist-free 2001. And $6 billion higher than the actual terrorist-affected 2001. With just over 600 mainline planes in 2012 instead of just over 900 mainline planes in 2001, the planes and the people certainly brought in more revenue per unit.
As an aside, total fuel cost in 2001 was $2.888 billion, and of course, fuel consumption went down for the last four months of 2001. Continuing with the pro-forma comparison of a hypothetical terrorist-free 2001 with 2012, the 2001 fuel cost would have been approximately $400 million more than the actual result, for a pro-forma 2001 fuel cost of $3.288 billion. 2012 fuel totaled $8.717 billion (on 15% less fuel consumed). So the 2012 revenues are about $3 billion higher than the pro-forma 2001 revenues and the 2012 fuel cost was about $5.4 billion higher than the pro-forma 2001 fuel costs. Unfortunately, employee concessions helped pay the $2.4 billion difference.
