Virgin America Reports Negative 67 Percent Margin for First Three Quarters of 2008

(MoneyWatch)  Now that the release of Virgin America's financial information is imminent, the airline has decided to try to do a little damage control. Today, before the information was released, the airline put out a press release showing some high, er, lowlights of its financial performance. The results were far worse than I could have imagined, though I'll wait for the full results to see what really caused such a staggering negative 67 percent net margin for the first three quarters of 2008.

The most recent data right now is through the third quarter of 2008, so we won't see anything more current for a little while. That means we will have access to an additional year of data from Virgin America than we previously were able to access as soon as it's released this week.

In its press release, Virgin America announced that it lost $175.4 million for the first three quarters of 2008 on total revenues of $259.6 million. That is a staggering loss, to say the least. Perhaps even more frightening is that the airline appears to have been running a fairly healthy load factor during that period. Second quarter loads were at 77.6 percent while third quarter rose to 81.4 percent. So it's not like they can add quickly to the bottom line by filling a lot more seats.

On the brighter side, of course, is that fuel has tanked since those days, so the cost outlook is much brighter. Still, with those kind of margins, lower costs won't cover everything by a longshot. It is, however, possible that there were some large non-cash charges that make up the bulk of this massive loss and the operation is in better shape. Were that the case, I would have expected the airline to highlight its operating margin in the release, but we don't see that anywhere. As I said, we'll know more when the full dataset comes out.