Skailark launches Airline Economics Q1’26

Skailark launches Airline Economics Q1’26

Quarterly Innovation Update Q1’26

We have just released our Q1’26 update.

Please find below a summary of the most important product enhancements:

A. Product & User Interface

  1. New airport cost deep dive dashboard
  2. New revenue over time dashboard
  3. New profit over time dashboard
  4. New monthly level in Tableau
  5. New user manual

B. Model and Data Updates

  1. New cost item: G&A Personnel
  2. Quality uplift of Pax & Revenue data
  3. New airline added
  4. Minor model improvements
  5. Updated Q4’25 financials and added Q1’26 forecasts
Access Airline Economics Q1’26

All our subscribers have received complimentary access to the updated data as of today. We welcome any feedback, both on insights as well as usability. 


Note: To access data from any previous versions, please access our archive here.


A. Product & User Interface

1 New airport cost deep dive dashboard
We have expanded our Airport cost offering with a dedicated deep dive dashboard, giving you further visibility into the cost components behind every flight.
 
You can now break down airport costs by landing fees, takeoff charges, emissions, parking and lighting – calculated flight-by-flight with airport-level charges.
 
Cumulative noise margin (EPNdB) is also available by aircraft type at the bottom of the dashboard.
 
Exemplary use cases:

– Airlines: Support route development decisions and sharpen cost budgeting with granular airport-level cost data.
– Airports: Benchmark your fee structure against peers on a true like-for-like basis and understand your competitive positioning in the market.

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2 New revenue over time dashboard
Track airline revenue performance from 2019 to today, broken down into direct revenue, connecting revenue, cargo, and other revenue streams.
 
Filter by country-pair, hub airport, aircraft type, and more. Additional metrics include total passengers, load factor, direct passenger share, and revenue per direct or connecting passenger.
 
Exemplary use case:
– Identify where airlines generate their highest-value revenue and how that has shifted over time.

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3 New profit over time dashboard
Airline profitability from 2019 to today – by route, country-pair, and airport hub. Revenue and cost in one view, with margin data at your fingertips.
 
Exemplary use cases:
– Pinpoint which airline’s markets and routes are structurally profitable for competitors – and which are not.
– Track how profitability has evolved last months & quarters across carriers, regions, and more.

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4 New monthly level in Tableau
Following direct feedback from our customers, all dashboards are now available at monthly level, selectable from January 2019 onwards.
 
Move seamlessly between monthly, quarterly, and annual views – giving you the granularity to spot seasonal trends, identify inflection points, and align your analysis with your own reporting cycles.

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5 New user manual
More structure, more detail, and easier to navigate.
 
Whether you want to understand how a variable is calculated, the formula behind it, or what Skailark strips out of total revenue and total costs from financial reports, you will now find the answers faster.
 
The updated user manual is available in the same location as before (last dashboard in Tableau).

B. Model and Data Updates

1 New cost item: G&A Personnel

We are introducing a new bottom-up G&A cost variable, covering the full employer cost of staffing an airline’s non-operational (Human Resources, Network Planning, Finance and similar) workforce – from base salary through to social contributions, payroll taxes, mandatory benefits and other overhead expenditures.
 
Methodology:

– Airline-level FTE figures collected from multiple data sources (financial reports, LinkedIn, procured databases) and cross-referenced with ICAO data, where available
– Matched against location-specific office salary data by role and seniority

Note: This captures airline-level G&A only. Group-level G&A remains under Other & Overhead. Sales personnel salary costs excluded (separate model). 
 
Exemplary use case:

– Competitive benchmarking: Understand how your non-operational workforce structure compares to peers over time.
– Cost budgeting & forecasting: Use competitor G&A as a reference point when building or stress-testing your own cost plans.

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2 Quality uplift of Pax & Revenue data 

We have made significant improvements in our Pax & Revenue model this quarter.
 
Major improvements include:

– Origin and Destination (O&D) data, the crown jewel of aviation analytics, is now available

– Expanded our training dataset
a. Incorporated worldwide GDS data
b. Governmental data from Asian, European and North American countries (actual booked itineraries by airlines, actual segment passengers by airlines)
c. Airport data sources (segment passengers by airlines)

– Connection time refinements, which yield more connections and realistic itineraries

The result is a meaningful step forward in revenue data accuracy and coverage.
 
Therefore, we have removed all BETA tags in Tableau. 
 
We are rolling this out to all customers now and look forward to your feedback – your input directly shapes how we continue to refine the model.

3 New airline added

We are pleased to announce the addition of Air Caraibes.

A full overview of all airlines in Airline Economics 360° can be found here.

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4 Minor model improvements
As always, throughout the quarter we have continued to review and refine all of our models to ensure they remain up to date and accurately reflect current industry developments.

A few selected examples include the following:

– Updated allocation costs of Marketing, Distribution, Sales personnel, and G&A to markets/routes. Top-down allocation based on bottom-up costs per cabin class (F, C, W, PY, Y). Our User Manual explains this in more detail.

– FTE collection for Flight crew and Cabin crew by operating carrier from financial/industry reports & ICAO, especially for Middle East, Europe and Asia.

– We have expanded our Airport cost coverage to include parking charges, now captured as a standalone variable and visible in the Airport Cost deep dive dashboard. We derive this data by collecting the airport charges documents from every airport worldwide, and calculating the cost per flight from there.

5 Updated Q4’25 financials and added Q1’26 forecasts

As you are already familiar with by now, we have validated our Q4’25 forecasts with reported actual financials (where available). Furthermore, we have added Q1’26 supply data including our latest outside-in forecasts. 

Skailark support form & email contact
 
We’d like to remind you of the dedicated channels available for support-related queries.
 
For all support inquiries, please visit our support format skailark.com/support (under Client Access). This ensures your requests are streamlined and addressed efficiently. Alternatively, you can also reach us via email at support@skailark.com 
 
If you have questions about the update or need further support, feel free to get in touch using these channels.

Contact us