
                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: FRIDAY, November 18, 1994                   TAG: 9411180092
SECTION: BUSINESS                    PAGE: A-19   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: Associated Press
DATELINE: NEW YORK                                LENGTH: Medium

CRASHES STILL PINCHING USAIR'S WALLET

More than two months after its latest plane crash, USAir continues to lose ticket sales from worried fliers and says its fourth-quarter results will be hurt significantly.

Passenger traffic has been depressed to the point that even fare discounts can't attract enough new passengers to offset price cuts, USAir said in a quarterly report filed this week with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

USAir spokeswoman Andrea Butler said Thursday that, based on advance bookings, a full recovery isn't expected until January.

Two USAir crashes - one in Charlotte, N.C., in July and another near Pittsburgh in early September - have raised doubts among some travelers about the airline's safety.

In the SEC filing, USAir said the two crashes hurt third-quarter revenues by $40 million, three-quarters of which came in September after the Pittsburgh crash. The company was not specific about the fourth-quarter impact of the crashes but said it would be ``material.''

USAir lost $180 million in the third quarter. Its stock has fallen about 30 percent since the Sept. 8 crash that killed 132 people near Aliquippa, Pa.

USAir flights from Roanoke Regional Airport left with 54.5 percent of the seats filled on average during September, the latest month for which statistics are available. That was down from 58.6 percent a year earlier but in the same range as other carriers operating at the airport, said airport spokesman Mark Courtney. The overall figure for all airlines at the airport in September was 53.7 percent.

"That's not a low load factor," Courtney said. "Anything operating in the mid-50s is certainly an overall healthy load factor," he said. The load factor refers to the percentage of seats filled by paying customers.

USAir accounts for 1,387, or nearly two-thirds, of the 2,163 daily outbound passenger seats at the Roanoke airport.

As early as a month after the Pittsburgh crash, USAir said its high-fare business traveler traffic had returned to normal and leisure traffic was improving.

by CNB