Photo by Miguel Ángel Sanz on Unsplash

While Jamie Dimon's latest cryptic warning about the state of the US economy has (at least temporarily) sent US equity futures into the red Wednesday morning (which is very concerning for equity bulls after three days in the red plus Michael Burry's latest apocalyptic tweet), good news arrived in a corner of the market that has little to do with banking or tech.

Even as COVID cases bounce back (and 40% of China's economy is under some level of lockdown measures), Delta Air Lines released some guidance that caught investors' attention and sent its shares soaring in premarket trading.

DAL said it expects to return to a profit this quarter thanks to a jump in bookings that are helping offset higher jet fuel costs. The airline now believes it will finally see sales return to (very close to) the pre-COVID level from 2019 before mid-year.

Delta said Wednesday it expects unit revenues to rise double digits during the second quarter compared with 2019 and that sales overall will be recovered to as much as 97% of sales generated three years ago before Covid devastated travel demand.

Here are the highlights from the company's earnings press release for the quarter ended in March 2022. Here are the Bloomberg highlights.

• Adjusted loss per share $1.23, estimate loss/shr $1.26 (Bloomberg Consensus)
• Loss per share $1.48
• Adjusted revenue of $8.16 billion, estimate $8.12 billion
• Passenger revenue $6.91 billion, estimate $7.07 billion
• Passenger load factor 75%, estimate 79%
• Available seat miles 51.81 billion, estimate 52.22 billion
• Revenue passenger miles 38.70 billion, estimate 41.52 billion
• Adjusted net loss $784 million, estimate loss of $803.2 million
• Yield per passenger mile 17.85c, estimate 17.38c

Delta shares were up nearly 7% on the news, dragging JetBlue, United, and other airline stocks up with it.

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