Claymore Securities is digging into the battered transportation sector more with plans to launch the first exchange-traded fund focusing on the airlines industry.

Next month, the ETF provider says the Claymore/NYSE Arca Airline ETF should be ready to trade. The announcement comes after Claymore earlier this year launched the Claymore/Delta Global Shipping ETF (NYSE Arca: SEA).

Both ETFs fit within the area of transportation portfolios, of which there are only a handful of ETFs. The biggest is the iShares Dow Jones U.S. Transportation (NYSEArca: IYT). IYT is the only transportation ETF with a significant level of assets.

The first-mover advantage does exist for the airlines ETF (as it did in the case of SEA), since there is no airline-specific ETF in the U.S.

Claymore's SEA has not seen the type of early success that would necessarily promulgate the launch of a second transportation portfolio based on first-mover status. SEA had $10.4 million in assets through Dec. 10.

The other transportation ETF launched this year, the Invesco PowerShares Capital Management Global Progressive Transportation Portfolio (NasdaqGM: PTRP), has about $1.8 million in assets. IYT, on the other hand, has $420 million in assets.

SEA and PTRP are probably more like each other in focusing on Industrials and Energy than either is like the planned global airlines ETF.

What's more, while airlines are the fifth-largest sector weighting in IYT, representing 6.4% of the ETF, that weighting is spread across just four major U.S. airlines: AMR Corp., JetBlue Airways, Southwest Airlines and Continental Airlines.

The Claymore planned ETF is a pure-play passenger airline ETF. It will hold 24 global airline stocks, 70% domestic and 30% international. The top three stocks in each category will be weighted 15% in the case of domestic, and 4.5% in the case of international airlines. That puts the remaining index weights for the 18 other stocks in the ETF at 25% for domestic and 16.5% for international. All holdings must derive at least 50% of their business from passenger airline activity.

With oil reaching new lows, and the major shakeout in the industry already having occurred, there are fewer planes being flown by consolidated carriers, and the price of oil is no longer single-handedly poised to bankrupt carriers. Overall industry projections expect losses in 2009, but much lower than this year's performance for the major airlines.

What all four ETFS have in common is a concentrated portfolio approach. SEA holds just 30 stocks, PTRP has 39 stocks and IYT only has 21 portfolio holdings, compared with the underlying NYSE Arca airline index of 24 stocks.

The proposed ticker symbol and the ETF's expense ratio were not included in the initial filing.

You can read the prospectus here.