U.S. Airlines: TSA screening softness persists; but AAL, UAL, and DAL‘s ASM-weighted screenings look better than peers‘

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U.S. Airlines: TSA screening softness persists; but AAL, UAL, and DAL‘s ASM-weighted screenings look better than peers‘

27 July 2026

U.S. Airlines

U.S. Airlines: TSA screening softness persists; but AAL, UAL, and

DAL's ASM-weighted screenings look better than peers'

Today’s note summarizes airport level screening activity and changes to airline capacity. David Vernon

+1 917 344 8333 Download of underlying data can be found here.

david.vernon@bernsteinsg.com

Trailing 7-day average TSA screenings continue to run lower than both 2024 and

Justine Weiss 2025 levels, as seen in Exhibit 1. This deceleration in foot traffic has coincided with broad-

+1 917 344 8433 based weakness across each major U.S. airlines’ foot traffic exposure. justine.weiss@bernsteinsg.com

Carriers showed little improvement over the last 7 days (-2.6% YoY) vs. last 4 weeksSpecialist Sales

(-3% YoY), as ASM-weighted foot traffic continues to look soft across major U.S.

Steve Song carriers. Looking at L7D YoY growth in ASM-weighted TSA throughput data (Exhibit 2),

+1 917 344 8401 Alaska Airlines (-4.9%) and Southwest Airlines (-4.4%) led the declines (to be fair, LUV’s steve.song@bernsteinsg.com

capacity is also down ~2% over the same period, contributing to the passenger throughput

decline), while American (-1.1%), United (-2.2%), and Delta (-2.3%) held up a bit better vs.

peers, pointing to a divergence between legacy network carriers and more leisure-skewed

operators.

Both the Western and Eastern U.S. show most major airports reporting YoY declines,

though the West fared even worse. As shown inExhibit 4, the Northeast corridor

exhibited broad weakness, with EWR, JFK, LGA all trending negative, while New England

and parts of the Southeast stood out as bright spots (e.g. strength at BOS, CLT, ATL, and