Delta Air Lines Inc expects its full-year profit to be at or above the midpoint of its prior guidance, excluding the impact of a midsummer computer system outage, suggesting the carrier doesn’t see much lingering impact from a glitch that led to thousands of flight cancellations.

Full-year profit will be about US$6.50 a share, in the middle of its prior outlook for US$6 to US$7, the Atlanta-based airline said in a regulatory filing on Thursday. The forecast doesn’t include a 45-cent impact from the CrowdStrike Holdings Inc disruption in July that affected Delta flights over several days. 

Delta was most severely affected by the shutdown among US airlines. Revenue for the third quarter will be flat to up 1% from a year ago, including an estimated US$380 million reduction related to the flight chaos in July. That compares to an earlier outlook for revenue to be as much as 4% higher than a year ago. 

Even so, the company joined smaller carriers in reporting improving unit revenue trends, in part due to a slowdown in domestic capacity expansion. Too many seats in the market pressured fares early in the summer, preventing airlines from fully benefitting from record travel demand. 

Alaska Air Group Inc raised its profit outlook on Thursday to US$2.15 to US$2.25 a share from an earlier estimate of as much as US$1.60, and JetBlue Airways Corp last week said revenue would up 1% to down 2.5% year-over-year. It had earlier expected a drop of as much as 5.5%.

Delta shares reversed an early gain, falling 2.1% to US$43.33 as of 10.05am in New York. 

Non-fuel unit costs will increase about 5.5% in the current quarter. Delta had earlier expected an increase of as much as 2%. It includes about US$170 million paid out for passenger reimbursements and spending related to misplaced crews during the outage.

Third-quarter earnings per share will be at the high end of its prior guidance for US$1.70 to US$2, also excluding the CrowdStrike outage, Delta said. 

  - Bloomberg