Big day in airlineland today. American Airlines, Southwest Airlines and Delta Air Lines all reported second quarter earnings.

For PlaneBusiness Banter subscribers, we’ll be taking a longer look at the results and the respective airline’s earnings calls in this week’s issue.

But in the meantime, here is a short and sweet take on the results posted today.

Let’s start first with Southwest Airlines. Today the airline reported net income of $278 million or $0.36 a share. This compares not-so-favorably to last year when the airline reported net income of $333 million or $0.40 a share. Yes, net income was down 17%. The problem here? Slowing demand and rising fuel costs.

The sluggish demand could be seen clearly in the airline’s load factor numbers. The airline added 9.2% more available seat miles for the quarter, but revenue passenger miles increased by only 6.6%, resulting in a 1.85 load factor point drop to 76.1%.

Yield was down 1.7% while RASM declined 4.1%.

See why certain folks, including me, have been questioning Southwest’s continued push to add more capacity since last fall? (Although I still think we were first.)

In the case of American, the airline posted net income of $317 million or $1.08 per diluted share.  This was slightly less than the analyst consensus of $1.19.

In the airline’s press release, it said that “weather disruptions” cost it about $0.12 per share.  The results represented AMR’s fifth consecutive profitable quarter. A year ago, AMR reported diluted EPS of $1.14, however, that was on 12% fewer shares outstanding.

While there’s no question the airline has been beset with weather issues, particularly in and around DFW this spring –  the issue here, I think, is whether or not the weather issues have been the only source of operational problems.  American is not the only airline to have faced “weather-related” issues in the second quarter. Yet they seem to be blaming a much larger hit to their results as a side-effect of such problems. At least in terms of the three airlines that reported results today.

Finally, Delta Air Lines reported earnings today as well. As we said last week in PBB, Delta revenue management guru Gail Grimmett has had good reason to do her secret little RASM dance with her tambourine of late. These results give us hard numbers as to why this is the case.

The airline reported the best numbers of the three airlines that reported in today. The strength here? Revenues. The airline reported net income of $1.77 billion, or $4.49 a share, compared to a loss of $2.21 billion in the same period a year earlier. Excluding reorganization and related one-time items, Delta had a profit of $274 million, or $0.70 cents a share, in the second quarter. This easily beat analysts’ consensus, which had forecast a profit of $0.59 a share.

Okay guys. Off to listen to calls.

Ticker: (NYSE:LCC), (NYSE:AMR), (NYSE:DAL)