The keyest of key performance metrics in the airline industry is a non-GAAP metric known as TRASM, or total revenue per available seat mile. We quickly found Q3 TRASM in today’s earnings release, at 20.58 cents per mile.

Chart Delta’s TRASM over time, and you get Figure 1, below.

At first glance Q3 TRASM might seem underwhelming since it’s trending downward from Q2 and is a fair bit below the year-ago period, when it was 21.15 cents — but wait!

Remember that CrowdStrike IT disaster back in August? The one that grounded Delta flights for days? That disruption was so far-reaching that Delta had to include an explanatory note about the outage in today’s press release. The outage was so severe that it actually pushed TRASM down for the quarter by a material amount.

Specifically, Delta said the outage pushed down TRASM by 1.1 “points.” If one assumes that a point is the same as cents, then third-quarter TRASM would have been 21.6 cents (the 20.58 cents reported + 1.1 more) in some parallel universe where the CrowdStrike disaster never occurred.

By the way, Delta also reported $170 million in costs related to the outage, mostly from refunding customers for canceled flights or compensating them in cash and loyalty points. Except, the outage also forced Delta to cancel 7,000 flights, which led to a fuel savings of $50 million. 

So if you net all that out, the CrowdStrike mess actually cost Delta only $120 million in Q3. (We assume there will be more costs in the future from civil lawsuits, regulatory probes, and other grief related to the meltdown.)

Anyway, Q3 earnings season has taken flight! You are now free to move about the Calcbench databases, seeing what else companies are reporting.