NEW YORK — American Airlines parent company AMR Corp. lost $238 million in the third quarter on employee severance payouts and other costs related to its bankruptcy.
Without those charges, the Fort Worth company posted an operating profit as it cut costs, paid less for fuel and benefited from a partnership that boosted traffic overseas.
The quarterly loss works out to 71 cents per share. A year ago, AMR lost $162 million, or 48 cents per share.
Excluding bankruptcy related costs, the company posted third-quarter earnings of $110 million.
AMR’s leaders said the company’s core performance improved, with it making more money per passengerand seeing fuller flights compared with any earlier quarter.
Revenue on a seat-mile basis, the U.S. industry benchmark for financial performance, rose 4.5 percent. The gain helped temper a drop in the airline’s domestic passenger traffic as flight delays snarled its schedule, reviving questions about whether the third-largest U.S. carrier can fend off a takeover from USAirways Group Inc. and exit bankruptcy on its own.
The carrier’s load factor, or average number of seats filled per plane, rose 0.6 point to 85.5 percent. That gain and unit-revenue improvement were both bolstered by a 2.5 percent reduction in flight and seat capacity during the quarter.
However, that effort was overshadowed late in thequarter by widespread cancellations and delays in September, which the airline blamed on its pilots.
“We haven’t delivered well enough for our customers in recent weeks and our operations have certainly not been up to our high standards,” Virasb Vahidi, AMR’s chief commercial officer, said in an interview.
Still, the airline said that costs related to the slowdown weren’t material to its quarterly results.
Flight delays that began in mid-September reduced unit revenue that month by fourtenths of a percentage point, Chief Financial Officer Bella Goren said in an interview. The operational difficulties were “not material” to financial results, the airline said.
Travel demand this quarter is steady and “on par with our expectations,” Goren said. “We’re seeing less sale activity in the industry, which has a positive effect on yield,” or average fare per mile.
Sales rose 0.8 percent to $6.4 billion in the quarter.
Total operating expense climbed 0.6 percent to $6.38 billion and unit costs, a measure of efficiency, rose 3.8 percent. Excluding restructuring items, total costs fell $170 million from a year ago.
Vahidi noted that after almost a year in bankruptcy, AMR is more than halfway to its goal of closing a gap in margins with its rivals. And unit revenue and traffic are heading in the right direction. The executive said cost savings should accelerate as it reaps benefits from new union contracts that it signed with thousands of employees.
American also said Wednesday that 2,250 of its flight attendants took $40,000 buyout offers to leave the company. It will hire 1,500 flight attendants starting next month because such a large number accepted the buyouts.
On Tuesday, AMR asked for a 30-day extension to file a reorganization plan. It’s the third time the company has asked for more time. Approval would push the deadline to late January. The current deadline to submit such a blueprint is Dec. 28, and Bankruptcy Judge Sean Lane has yet to rule on the request.
By the close of trading Tuesday, AMR’s stock price held steady at 37 cents per share.
Information for this article was contributed by Samantha Bomkamp of The Associated Press and by Mary Schlangenstein, James Langford and Niamh Ring of Bloomberg News.
Business, Pages 29 on 10/18/2012