American Airlines loses $375M, sees challenges ahead

Still, the loss reported Wednesday was much smaller than Wall Street expected, and AMR's long-depressed shares jumped 79 cents, or 18.7 percent, to close at $5.01 after hitting $5.15 earlier in the day.

Even though it cut flights, American's planes were not as full. Corporate travel was especially weak and revenue tumbled 15 percent compared with the first quarter of 2008, wiping out the airline's gain from cheaper fuel.The question facing airlines and investors is whether the industry has hit bottom, and American stopped short of giving a definitive answer.

American officials said through June advance bookings as a percentage of capacity are running 2 percentage points lower than a year ago even with far fewer flights than last year. They said those numbers were consistent with what they saw in January."I'm going to look at it half-full today and say we're not seeing further deterioration," said Gerard Arpey, AMR's chairman and chief executive.AMR lost $1.35 per share in the first quarter, including a charge of 5 cents per share related to leases on retired aircraft. Revenue was $4.84 billion.

Analysts surveyed by Thomson Reuters expected AMR to lose $1.68 per share on revenue of $4.73 billion. A year ago, the carrier lost $341 million, or $1.37 per share, on $5.70 billion in revenue.AMR was the first big U.S. airline company to report first-quarter results, and analysts expect all the major carriers to post losses, as traffic fell sharply. American's traffic tumbled 12 percent in the quarter, compared with a year ago, although the drop-off slowed slightly to 10.9 percent in March.