It is beginning to sound like a broken record, but Mesa Air Group [MESA] again dominates the monthly traffic reports released by 15 regional airlines. For the second month in a row, 12 of the 15 airlines recorded improvements in the major traffic indexes.

Each month since last September, Mesa has led the pack with growth in traffic in the month-over-month reports. In July, Mesa had the highest growth rate in traffic (82.5 percent), the highest growth in capacity (64.5 percent) and the largest gain in passengers (61.9 percent). US Airways' [UAIR] three wholly owned regional carriers flying under the US Airways Express banner reported a 13.9-point gain in load factor in the July-over-July tally. The 70.4 percent load factor is highest average load factor for the unit.

For the second month in a row, FLYi [FLYI], the former Atlantic Coast Airlines, led the group with the greatest losses. July was a milestone month for the carrier as it was the first full month of Independence Air and the last full month flying for United Airlines [UALAQ]. In each case, it was flying a partial schedule. Over the course of July, the carrier at any given time was flying about 38 fewer planes than in July 2003. While it retired a portion of its BAe Jetstream 41 turboprops, it had a number of Bombardier [BBD] CRJ 200s out of service as they were refitted for Independence Air. While FLYi filed a consolidated traffic report comparing July-to-July, it for the first time broke out its Independence Air traffic. It did not break out the United or Delta Connection statistics. In July, Independence Air carried 196,387 passengers and its planes were on average 47 percent filled. It recorded 75.9 million revenue passenger miles (RPM) and 161.5 million available seat miles (ASM).

Aside from FLYi, three carriers continued to report less activity in July compared to the previous July. Midwest Connect had the largest drop in RPMs (-4.3 percent) and in ASMs (-5.5 percent). The July skid for Midwest was deeper than Chicago Express, which also posted dips in the same two indexes. The slide in passenger enplanements at Mesaba Airlines was greater in July (-4.4 percent) than in June (-2.4 percent).