Delta Air Lines Senior Vice President and General Counsel Ben Hirst testified on behalf of the Air Transport Association before the Commodity Futures Trading Commission recently and had this to say, “In the fourth quarter of this year, domestic seating capacity is expected to decline to levels we last saw in the fourth quarter of 2001, in the immediate aftermath of 9/11. In fact, by the fourth quarter of this year, U.S. carriers will offer almost 1.8 billion fewer available seat miles every week than they did in the fourth quarter of 2007. And that figure represents the cuts on domestic routes only. When you add in cuts that have been made to international routes, the numbers are even larger.”