As you may be aware, Delta Air Lines, which is headquartered in Atlanta, plans to merge with Northwest Airlines to create the world's largest airline.
Naturally there is a lot about this being written in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. This past Tuesday, in the AJC's business section there was a table explaining the various statistics comparing the new proposed Delta Airline with the next ten in various categories, such as number of employees, passengers, sales, and traffic. With regard to traffic, the introductory paragraph read thus, "Traffic is the gold standard airlines use to compare the size of their operations. It's measured in 'revenue passenger-miles' or as in these figures, 'revenue passenger-kilometers.' That would lead me to believe that the statistic, when done internationally, is done using using the metric measure. The note below the section read, "Unit equal to one paying passenger flown one kilometer, for example, a plane with 100 passengers that flies 1,000 kilometers would produce 100,000 revenue passenger-kilometers. Norman Werling
