Chicago, U.S.A. — Scheduled flight operations within North America will be at their lowest August level for 10 years, according to the latest statistics from flight schedule data market leader OAG, a UBM Aviation brand.

The OAG FACTS (Frequency and Capacity Trend Statistics) for August 2012 reveals that this month there will be 953,083 fewer air seats offered within North America compared with August 2011, with 21,401 fewer flights. For the year to date, decreases of two per cent in flights and one per cent in seat capacity have been experienced compared with the first eight months of 2011.

“Against the backdrop of a slowing economy the North American region is experiencing general consolidation of its internal scheduled air services,” said Rob Shaw, Director Analytics.

“This is partly the natural consequence of the well-publicised airline mergers of recent years, but it also reflects the strategy of individual carriers in a tough trading environment: reducing capacity to maintain fares at a profitable level.”

Only three of North America’s top 10 hubs (San Francisco at 7%, Charlotte at 5% and Toronto at 4%) will show significant growth in seat capacity this month, while capacity at Chicago O’Hare will drop by three per cent.

Middle East shows fastest long-haul growth with Dubai the key hub  

North America’s flights and seats to and from other worldwide regions will both show a two per cent increase in August, offering some better news, but the biggest growth in long-haul traffic is seen in the Middle East – driven largely by the United Arab Emirates and Dubai in particular.

This month will see flight operations to and from the Middle East grow by seven per cent to 64,252, while seat capacity will increase by eight per cent to reach 14,219,564 – nearly 4,000 more flights and more than a million more seats offered than in August 2011. Traffic within the Middle East region is also expected to grow by four per cent (flights) and three per cent (seats).

The Middle East region’s key hubs are all experiencing strong year-on-year growth in August, with Abu Dhabi seeing seats increasing by 248,896 (up 17%), Doha by 244,470 (11%) and Bahrain by 114,560 (11%).  By far the strongest performer in the region however is Dubai, with 782,544 additional seats and 2,694 additional flight operations compared with August 2011.

“Strategically, the Middle East is growing in importance all the time, particularly in terms of its links with Western Europe,” said Rob Shaw, Director Analytics.

“While capacity reductions are continuing on several key routes between Western Europe and the Asia-Pacific region, more than 400,000 extra seats are now offered between Western Europe and the Middle East. Of these, more than 70 per cent are on services to and from Dubai and Abu Dhabi, largely reflecting the continued expansion plans of the premier Gulf-based airlines.”

Global flights up by 1% and seats by 3%  

Dubai, with its 12 per cent increase in flight operations and 14 per cent increase in seat capacity, is also showing the fastest growth among the major global air hubs.

Seat capacity at eight of the world’s top 10 airports will grow this month. Beijing’s year-on-year increase of eight per cent brings it ever closer to Atlanta as the world’s largest hub in terms of seats offered, while Tokyo’s offering increased by nearly 375,000 seats, up five per cent on August 2011, securing its status as the world’s fourth-largest hub after London-Heathrow.

Worldwide, airlines have increased flights by 16,948 and seats by 9,608,208, taking the total scheduled flight operations for August 2012 to 2,789,437 and the total of seats offered to 361,193,356. This represents growth of one per cent in flights but three per cent in seats, which is explained by the increased use of larger aircraft. Average aircraft seat capacity is 129 this month compared with 127 in August 2011.

For the year to date, scheduled flights show a growth of two per cent and seat capacity an increase of three per cent compared with the January-August period last year.

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In the 90s, every woman was a Miranda, Carrie, Samantha or Charlotte. ‘Sex and the City’ provided an identification matrix with which the entire female population of the Western World could be neatly categorized into one of four groups. What a time for feminism.

Thankfully, it is not the 90s anymore. Indeed, Carrie Fever has devolved into a series of tired movies kept afloat by menopausal soccer-moms who refuse to smile at the overpaid screenwriters’ desperately persistent wordsmithery for fear of angering the vengeful botox Gods. The time of ‘Sex and the City’ is passed; it is now, if modern media is to be believed, the golden age of HBO’s ‘Girls’.

The comparison between the two immensely popular televisions series is not altogether apt. ‘Girls’ is about the lives of newly emancipated twenty somethings who struggle to find a place for themselves in a world in which a liberal arts degree has exactly as much value as the (recycled) paper it was printed on. On the other hand, ‘Sex and the City’ was about the lives of inexplicably upwardly mobile thirty somethings who struggle to multitask the immensely complicated activities of buying shoes, having orgasms, asking pert, rhetorical questions and going to brunch.

Occasionally, each show strays into the territory of the other– ‘Girls’ spends a fair deal of time in its premiere season focusing on the meaningful and meaningless sexual activities of its central characters, just as ‘Sex and the City’ delved into Carrie’s dire, if fleeting, financial problems and at times, and with a surprising degree of sensitivity, handled some of the Big Issues (Miranda’s pregnancy, Samantha’s breast cancer, Charlotte’s divorce.) It is worth noting how progressive ‘Sex and the City’ was in its day.

On the whole, from the comfortable vantage point of a 21st Century American, one might be initially forgiven for thinking of ‘Girls’ as an uncomfortably realistic foil against the puffy, aged, formulaic sensationalism of ‘Sex and the City.’ However, it’s actually more complicated than that.

Where ‘Girls’ and ‘Sex and the City’ primarily overlap is that they both provide depictions of contemporary womanhood and specifically female friendship; creator and lead actress of ‘Girls’, Lena Dunham, chose the name of her show with intent. In one of the first scenes of the pilot episode, in fact, protagonist Hannah Horvath, a budding writer, wallows in the bathtub while she speaks to her uptight roommate and best friend, Marnie. With this intimate picture, Dunham establishes the idea that the friendship of these two characters, which is at the heart of the show, could only occur between two women. Furthermore, as actor, heart-throb and NYU alum, James Franco points out in an article for the Huffington Post, Dunham provides very little insight into the perspective of the male characters. This initial season of the show explores experiences that most people go through– unemployment, breakups, drug use, STDs– but somehow deftly anchors these experiences to a uniquely feminine perspective. Go figure: ‘Girls’ is about girls.

‘But what kind of girls is ‘Girls’ about?,’ you might ask. Well, on paper, the answer seems to be that ‘Girls’ is about girls like me: a middle-class, cisgendered, 22 year old University of Pennsylvania attendee, with a BAS in History and English and a group of close female friends, who is struggling to become a writer. Apart from my ethnicity and time spent in Australia, I meet all the necessary requirements for a Hannah Horvath. And yet, unlike ‘Sex and the City”s characterizations, I can’t but hope that I’m nothing like sensitive Hannah, or, for that matter, neurotic Marnie, or naïve Shoshanna or free-spirited Jessa.

Like ‘Sex and the City’, ‘Girls’ has its clearly defined female archetypes. However, Dunham is a significantly more talented writer than those who powered ‘Sex and the City’ for so many barren years, and, as such, there are shades of gray to her characters and their friendships that distort the paradigmatic boundaries of who she represents. Interestingly, for the most part, the primary way in which these shades of grey show themselves in the course of this season, though there is some indication that things will change in the next, is through the moulding of ‘Girls’ female characters into awful human beings to a magnitude that is alienating, rather than humanizing. The girls of ‘Girls’, to different extents, are selfish, narcissistic and inconsiderate.

By contrast, frankly put, the women of ‘Sex and the City’ are so consumed with embodying type A or type B– being Carrie, Samantha, Miranda or Charlotte– that they don’t have enough depth to be generally and basically, sordidly, awful. Lacking ambiguity, the characters of ‘Sex and the City’ are stellar examples of postcard cutouts of real people, 2 dimensional images that haven’t the volume to contain concepts of good or bad. But boy, do they ever seem better than the alternative.

Season one of ‘Girls’ is hilarious, confronting, beautiful, puzzling, difficult to watch, charming and well made, but is it about me? I hope not; I’ll stay a Samantha-Charlotte hybrid, please and thank-you.

Image Courtesy of  Girls

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