Available seat miles

Well kiddo, when people want to travel on an airplane, they have to buy a ticket for a seat. But the airline needs to know how many seats they have on their planes and how far they can fly those planes. Available seat miles is just one way they measure that!

Think of it like this: imagine you have a toy car that you can drive around your house. It can go a certain distance, maybe from one end of the living room to the other. Now pretend you have five of those cars that can all go the same distance. That means you have five times the "available car miles" because you have five cars that can go the same distance. Same thing for airlines!

An "available seat mile" is a way for airlines to figure out how many seats they have and how far those seats can go. They take the number of seats on each plane and multiply it by the distance each plane can fly. That gives them the total available seat miles for that plane. And they do that for all their planes combined to figure out how many available seat miles they have as a whole airline!

So if an airline has 100 planes and each plane can fly 1,000 miles with 150 seats, that's 100 x 1,000 x 150 = 15,000,000 available seat miles! That means they can carry 15 million passengers one mile each. That's a lot of flying!

Hope that helps, kiddo!