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If You Invested in These Airline Stocks 10 Years Ago, Here’s How Much You’d Have Now

May 3, 2025

4 min Read

Written by Vance Cariaga

Edited by Amen Oyiboke

Alaska Airlines Airbus a320 aircraft with deployed landing gear preparing for landing at SJC airport - San Jose, California, USA - 2020.

Michael Vi / Getty Images

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Airline stocks looked like a pretty decent bet a decade ago. Despite ongoing challenges, the industry had recovered from the beating it took a few years earlier during the Great Recession.

Many airline stocks were trading near record highs in 2015 and would continue to push higher for the next couple of years.

Unfortunately, if you invested money in airline stocks 10 years ago, you probably lost money. Just about all of the leading U.S. airline stocks have seen their share prices sink over the past decade — and a couple have tumbled more than 80%.

The main culprit was the COVID-19 pandemic, which “wreaked devastation across the aviation value chain,” according to a report from McKinsey & Company. After the pandemic hit, airline industry revenues sank by 55% and many carriers are still struggling to recover.

There have been some encouraging signs of late — or had been, before President Donald Trump’s massive tariff plans raised fears of inflation, recession and a drop in travel spending.

Last year, the International Air Transport Association raised its profit forecast for the airline industry and projected record revenue of nearly $1 trillion for 2024, CNBC reported. The U.S. airline sector began 2025 operating at “greater than pre-pandemic levels,” according to Bain & Company data cited by Insider Monkey.

But that optimism has faded in recent weeks as the airline industry braces for the impact of tariffs.

As GOBankingRates recently reported, United Airlines said it plans to trim its domestic capacity by about 4% beginning in the 2025 third quarter in anticipation of lower travel spending and the possibility of a recession. Other carriers also have trimmed their growth plans, including Delta Air Lines and Frontier Airlines.

One result is that airline stocks have fallen hard in 2025, along with the broader stock markets. If you bought airline stocks a decade ago, chances are you lost a good deal of money. Only United would have provided a positive return, and that return was minimal compared with the overall stock market.

Below is a look how much your investments would be worth now if you had invested $1,000 in six leading U.S. airline stocks 10 years ago. Airlines are listed alphabetically. None announced stock splits over the past decade.