Republic Holdings:

“Monday, Republic Airways Holdings Inc. (RJET), a provider of various airfreight services, announced traffic results for the month of January, reporting a 34.1% rise in traffic on 30.6% increase in total capacity. Load factor for the month increased 1.7 points.

For the month of January, Republic Airways’ load factor increased 1.7 points to 65.6% from 63.9% in the same month of the previous year.

The Indianapolis, Indiana-based company’s revenue passenger miles of 710.0 million were 34.1% higher than 529.3 million in the comparable month of the earlier year. Available seat miles grew 30.6% to 1.08 billion from 828.6 million in the same month a year ago.”

Mesa Air Group:

Mesa Air Group, Inc. reported its preliminary traffic figures for January 2008. Year-over-year available seat miles decreased 11.76% in January 2008 to 690,205 compared to 782,157 in January 2007. Revenue passenger miles decreased 13.15% from 537,740 in 2007 to 467,045 in 2008. Passenger enplanements decreased 14.33% from 1,267,414 in January 2007 to 1,085,778 in January 2008. Year-over-year load factor for the month of January was 67.67% in 2008 compared to 68.75% in 2007. (A decline of 1.1 point.)

Oh, and Mesa’s money-losing go! operation? The airline flew at a 58.36% load factor in January. For 2007 the load factor was 58.41%.

In the airline’s release, Mesa CEO Jonathan Ornstein was quoted as saying that the airline’s operations had been negatively affected by “severe winter weather.”

So how come Republic’ s operations weren’t so adversely affected by the same “severe winter weather?”

Apparently some other folks aren’t buying the story that all of this decline is due to bad weather, as shares of Mesa are down about 8% as of this writing, posting the biggest decline today (so far) for the sector.

Tickers: (Nasdaq:RJET); (Nasdaq:MESA)