Airline industry expects long-term rebound

After flying into the financial turbulence of the COVID-19 pandemic, the airline sector expects passenger traffic to take off despite concerns about the industry’s impact on climate change.

In its latest look at trends for the sector, the International Air Transport Association (IATA) said it did not expect world air traffic to resume to reach prepandemic levels before 2023.

But air traffic should almost double over the next 20 years, from 4.5 billion passengers in 2019 to 8.5 billion in 2039. That is, however, a drop of 1 billion passengers from IATA’s precrisis forecast.

That will nevertheless be good news for aircraft manufacturers, which slowed down production during the crisis as airlines canceled orders to stay financially afloat.

Airbus has already announced it plans to step up the manufacturing cadence of its best-selling A320 single-aisle aircraft and says it should already reach a record level in 2023.

Boeing, for its part, forecasts that airlines will need 43,110 new aircraft through 2039, which will result in a near doubling of the global fleet. Asia alone will account for 40 percent of that demand.

As with the 9/11 attacks or the 2007-2009 global financial crisis, “the industry will prove resilient again”, Boeing vice president of marketing Darren Hulst said last year.

Marc Ivaldi, research director at the Paris-based School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences (EHESS), noted that only 1 percent of the population currently used air travel.

“With the simple demographic rise and the fact that people become richer, there will be rising demand for air travel and thus for aircraft,” he told AFP.

If the biggest aircraft fleets are currently in the United States and Europe, the biggest increases are expected in Asia and the Middle East, consulting firm Oliver Wyman said in a recent study.

Airbus delivered 19 percent of its planes to China, more than the US, and this trend is not expected to change. Meanwhile, air travel is becoming possible for more and more people n many emerging countries where the middle class is expanding.

“Among Asia’s emerging nations, one of the greatest aspirational goals is simply the ability to fly internationally,” said the Centre for Aviation (CAPA).

“It is a sign of social and economic maturity and permits experiences which were unthinkable for their parents,” it added.

CAPA also noted that these people were unlikely to share the growing sentiment among some people in the West toward reducing air travel to reduce one’s carbon footprint.

“For these new would-be flyers, the whole concept of ‘flight shaming’ at a grassroots level is grossly alien,” said CAPA. “Consequently, in Asia, flight shaming is unlikely to gain much traction.”

The “flight shaming” or “flygskam” movement took off in Sweden in 2018 to challenge the growing popularity of air travel, which had boomed in Europe thanks to budget airlines that made weekend getaways across the continent affordable to a wider public.

In 2019, air traffic declined by 4 percent in Sweden, but it hit a record across Europe, according to the air traffic control body Eurocontrol.

Ivaldi of EHESS believed that flight shaming would have little long-term impact. “Someone who makes one flight per year in a plane, do you really believe that they will say that it is too polluting and give it up?” he said.

But countries like Sweden have begun to reintroduce night trains to give travelers a greener travel option.

France, which is also boosting its night trains, is cutting domestic flights where it is possible to make the journey by train in less than 2.5 hours.

Ivaldi believes that to be a largely empty gesture, as fast trains have already taken most of the market on such routes.

Meanwhile, the commercial aviation sector has pledged to cut its carbon emissions in half by 2050 from its 2005 level. Airlines have an economic incentive to do so, as adopting more fuel-efficient planes reduces operating costs.