Delta Air Lines, which believed as recently as January that it was on track for its best financial year in company history, said Wednesday that disruptions in global trade have created such enormous uncertainty that it scratched its performance expectations for 2025.
It is a remarkable walk-back for the nation's most profitable airline, and other companies are following suit. Hours after Delta remove its guidance for the year, Walmart dropped the first quarter operating profit guidance it had provided to investors, citing tariff risks.
Delta is cutting its flight schedule in anticipation of a slowdown in spending as businesses and households brace for higher prices.
“With broad economic uncertainty around global trade, growth has largely stalled," CEO Ed Bastian said in a statement on Wednesday. "In this slower-growth environment, we are protecting margins and cash flow by focusing on what we can control. This includes reducing planned capacity growth in the second half of the year.”
In the first quarter, Delta earned $240 million, or 37 cents per share. A year earlier it earned $37 million, or 6 cents per share, when profit was weighed down by a new contract with pilots.
Stripping out one time costs and benefits, earnings were 46 cents per share. That's better than the 40 cents per share analysts polled by Zacks Investment Research predicted.
Shares of Delta Air Lines Inc. rose more than 8%. Citi analysts suggested Delta may be the best airline with which to ride out the uncertainty in coming months for investors who want to maintain exposure to the travel sector.
“Overall, these results show a carrier with a resilient business model, in light of significant uncertainties around demand and the global tariff controversy,” Stephen Trent of Citi Investment Research wrote in a note to clients.
Still, the sector has been battered this year as investors, anticipating trouble from rising tariffs, put their money elsewhere. Shares are down 41% this year for the nation's most profitable airline, which is better than rivals American and United.
Quarterly operating revenue climbed to $14.04 billion from $13.75 billion, beating Wall Street's estimate of $13.81 billion.
The average fuel price per gallon declined to $2.47 from $2.79.
Delta cut its first-quarter earnings and revenue outlook last month, saying at the time that a recent decline in consumer and corporate confidence amid growing uncertainty over the economy was weakening domestic demand.
Delta said in March that it expected first-quarter revenue to rise between 3% and 4% compared with a year earlier, down from projections of 7% and 9%.
In January, Delta released fourth-quarter results that topped Wall Street’s profit and revenue estimates, as the company benefited from strong demand during the crucial holiday period.
Yet conditions have deteriorated since then with a burgeoning trade war leaving consumers and businesses unsure about what comes next. Both have begun to pull back on spending, and that includes travel.
Bastian said Delta foresees June quarter profitability of $1.5 to $2 billion but will not update its full-year outlook “given the lack of economic clarity.”
The airline previously said that it expected 2025 earnings of more than $7.35 per share and free cash flow of more than $4 billion. At the time the company was expecting strong travel demand to continue, and that has clearly changed.
A month ago Bastian was confident enough to stick by Delta's guidance for the year. Speaking at the JPMorgan Industrial Conference, the executive said at the time that Delta was feeling good about where it was at.
“There’s nothing that we’ve been through these last couple of months to indicate there’s any cracks in any of this,” he said. “We anticipate margins continuing to expand and we think margins will expand this year, even with the slower start to the year.”
Yet uncertainty over U.S. trade policy has rattled companies in every economic sector since then.
Bastian said during Delta's earnings call on Wednesday that the airline is seeing softness in domestic consumer and business travel given all of the uncertainty. There's been greater resilience in the international market so far, he added.
Bastian maintained that given current fuel prices and actions being taken, Delta is “well positioned to deliver solid profitability and meaningful cash flow in 2025.”
For the second quarter, the airline is looking for earnings between $1.70 and $2.30 per share, with total revenue down 2% to up 2%. Analysts surveyed by FactSet predict earnings of $2.21 per share.
“2025 is playing out differently than we expected at the start of the year,” Delta President Glen Hauenstein said. "As a result, we are adapting to current conditions while staying true to our long-term strategy.”
FILE - A Delta Air Lines plane takes off from Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport, Nov. 22, 2022, in Atlanta. (AP Photo/Brynn Anderson, File)
WASHINGTON (AP) — Becky Pepper-Jackson finished third in the discus throw in West Virginia last year though she was in just her first year of high school. Now a 15-year-old sophomore, Pepper-Jackson is aware that her upcoming season could be her last.
West Virginia has banned transgender girls like Pepper-Jackson from competing in girls and women's sports, and is among the more than two dozen states with similar laws. Though the West Virginia law has been blocked by lower courts, the outcome could be different at the conservative-dominated Supreme Court, which has allowed multiple restrictions on transgender people to be enforced in the past year.
The justices are hearing arguments Tuesday in two cases over whether the sports bans violate the Constitution or the landmark federal law known as Title IX that prohibits sex discrimination in education. The second case comes from Idaho, where college student Lindsay Hecox challenged that state's law.
Decisions are expected by early summer.
President Donald Trump's Republican administration has targeted transgender Americans from the first day of his second term, including ousting transgender people from the military and declaring that gender is immutable and determined at birth.
Pepper-Jackson has become the face of the nationwide battle over the participation of transgender girls in athletics that has played out at both the state and federal levels as Republicans have leveraged the issue as a fight for athletic fairness for women and girls.
“I think it’s something that needs to be done,” Pepper-Jackson said in an interview with The Associated Press that was conducted over Zoom. “It’s something I’m here to do because ... this is important to me. I know it’s important to other people. So, like, I’m here for it.”
She sat alongside her mother, Heather Jackson, on a sofa in their home just outside Bridgeport, a rural West Virginia community about 40 miles southwest of Morgantown, to talk about a legal fight that began when she was a middle schooler who finished near the back of the pack in cross-country races.
Pepper-Jackson has grown into a competitive discus and shot put thrower. In addition to the bronze medal in the discus, she finished eighth among shot putters.
She attributes her success to hard work, practicing at school and in her backyard, and lifting weights. Pepper-Jackson has been taking puberty-blocking medication and has publicly identified as a girl since she was in the third grade, though the Supreme Court's decision in June upholding state bans on gender-affirming medical treatment for minors has forced her to go out of state for care.
Her very improvement as an athlete has been cited as a reason she should not be allowed to compete against girls.
“There are immutable physical and biological characteristic differences between men and women that make men bigger, stronger, and faster than women. And if we allow biological males to play sports against biological females, those differences will erode the ability and the places for women in these sports which we have fought so hard for over the last 50 years,” West Virginia's attorney general, JB McCuskey, said in an AP interview. McCuskey said he is not aware of any other transgender athlete in the state who has competed or is trying to compete in girls or women’s sports.
Despite the small numbers of transgender athletes, the issue has taken on outsize importance. The NCAA and the U.S. Olympic and Paralympic Committees banned transgender women from women's sports after Trump signed an executive order aimed at barring their participation.
The public generally is supportive of the limits. An Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research poll conducted in October 2025 found that about 6 in 10 U.S. adults “strongly” or “somewhat” favored requiring transgender children and teenagers to only compete on sports teams that match the sex they were assigned at birth, not the gender they identify with, while about 2 in 10 were “strongly” or “somewhat” opposed and about one-quarter did not have an opinion.
About 2.1 million adults, or 0.8%, and 724,000 people age 13 to 17, or 3.3%, identify as transgender in the U.S., according to the Williams Institute at the UCLA School of Law.
Those allied with the administration on the issue paint it in broader terms than just sports, pointing to state laws, Trump administration policies and court rulings against transgender people.
"I think there are cultural, political, legal headwinds all supporting this notion that it’s just a lie that a man can be a woman," said John Bursch, a lawyer with the conservative Christian law firm Alliance Defending Freedom that has led the legal campaign against transgender people. “And if we want a society that respects women and girls, then we need to come to terms with that truth. And the sooner that we do that, the better it will be for women everywhere, whether that be in high school sports teams, high school locker rooms and showers, abused women’s shelters, women’s prisons.”
But Heather Jackson offered different terms to describe the effort to keep her daughter off West Virginia's playing fields.
“Hatred. It’s nothing but hatred,” she said. "This community is the community du jour. We have a long history of isolating marginalized parts of the community.”
Pepper-Jackson has seen some of the uglier side of the debate on display, including when a competitor wore a T-shirt at the championship meet that said, “Men Don't Belong in Women's Sports.”
“I wish these people would educate themselves. Just so they would know that I’m just there to have a good time. That’s it. But it just, it hurts sometimes, like, it gets to me sometimes, but I try to brush it off,” she said.
One schoolmate, identified as A.C. in court papers, said Pepper-Jackson has herself used graphic language in sexually bullying her teammates.
Asked whether she said any of what is alleged, Pepper-Jackson said, “I did not. And the school ruled that there was no evidence to prove that it was true.”
The legal fight will turn on whether the Constitution's equal protection clause or the Title IX anti-discrimination law protects transgender people.
The court ruled in 2020 that workplace discrimination against transgender people is sex discrimination, but refused to extend the logic of that decision to the case over health care for transgender minors.
The court has been deluged by dueling legal briefs from Republican- and Democratic-led states, members of Congress, athletes, doctors, scientists and scholars.
The outcome also could influence separate legal efforts seeking to bar transgender athletes in states that have continued to allow them to compete.
If Pepper-Jackson is forced to stop competing, she said she will still be able to lift weights and continue playing trumpet in the school concert and jazz bands.
“It will hurt a lot, and I know it will, but that’s what I’ll have to do,” she said.
Heather Jackson, left, and Becky Pepper-Jackson pose for a photograph outside of the U.S. Supreme Court in Washington, Sunday, Jan. 11, 2026. (AP Photo/Jose Luis Magana)
Heather Jackson, left, and Becky Pepper-Jackson pose for a photograph outside of the U.S. Supreme Court in Washington, Sunday, Jan. 11, 2026. (AP Photo/Jose Luis Magana)
Becky Pepper-Jackson poses for a photograph outside of the U.S. Supreme Court in Washington, Sunday, Jan. 11, 2026. (AP Photo/Jose Luis Magana)
The Supreme Court stands is Washington, Friday, Jan. 9, 2026. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite)
FILE - Protestors hold signs during a rally at the state capitol in Charleston, W.Va., on March 9, 2023. (AP Photo/Chris Jackson, file)
