Mesa Air Group Releases Delayed Second Quarter Earnings

(MoneyWatch)  Mesa Air Group has finally released its second quarter numbers. Wondering how they did that one day after the second quarter ended? Um, they didn't. Their second quarter ended on March 31, and these are horribly delayed. While it may look like a profitable quarter on the surface, dig down a little and you might be surprised at what you'll find.

Mesa kept putting off the release of these numbers over and over again. In fact, things apparently got tough enough that the interim CFO left the company and the President and COO Mike Lotz took over those duties. Talk about a full plate. But yesterday, the airline finally squeezed out the release with the first sentence saying, "Mesa Air Group, Inc. today announced second quarter after tax profit of $17.5 million from continuing operations on operating revenues of $320.3 million."

A profit, nice. Oh wait, just dig a little deeper and you'll see that's not exactly giving you a good sense of how the airline is doing. I scrolled down to look at operating profit, and sure enough there was one; it was $27.6 million. This still didn't sound right, so I kept digging.

Ah, there it is. Mesa reduced operating expenses by $34.1 million during the quarter due to the settlement of the lawsuit that they lost to Hawaiian,. So if you remove that non-recurring number, you have an operating loss.

That doesn't sound like a very good quarter to me. But now that the airline has won its battle with Delta and has seen Aloha go away in Hawai'i, maybe they'll start returning better numbers going forward.