Fear of flying is pushing ticket sales down in the wake of multiple crashes, airlines say

Two recent plane crashes have stoked worries among flyers and prompted some to pull back on air travel plans, according to two of the airlines that had those crashes. Delta Air Lines CEO Ed Bastian said Tuesday morning that the fatal crash of an American Airlines flight on approach to Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport in January, as well as a non-fatal crash in which a Delta flight flipped upside down upon landing in Toronto last month, are likely at least partly behind the travel pullback the airlines are seeing this year. “It caused a lot of shock among consumers,” he said at a JPMorgan Chase investors conference. Bastian did not say by how much ticket sales have slowed. On Monday the company revised its expected revenue growth for the quarter down by half in a regulatory filing. The crashes were some of the worst aviation incidents in the past 25 years, Bastian said, and as a result “there’s a whole generation of people traveling these days that didn’t realize these things can happen,” he said. That’s not the only thing driving down demand. Uncertainty about the economy and a drop in consumer confidence are also hurting, Delta said. But Bastian said the crash and worries about safety were “causal facts” in the drop-off in travel that a variety of US airlines are reporting. “We saw a pretty immediate stall in both corporate travel and bookings,” he said. “Consumer confidence and certainty in air travel started to wane a little bit as questions of safety came in.”<br/>