The Airline Industry: Can they get us all off the ground?

The year is 2022 and booking a flight has never been as easy or cheap. When commercial air travel started out, like most innovations in their infancy, it was reserved for the wealthy. Then what usually happens is scale makes it available for the masses. This is what we have seen progressively since the introduction of commercial air travel with prices have been falling year on year since the 1980s. But unlike the automotive industry which has been increasingly accessible to the masses with no hope of returning to exclusivity, the airline industry may be doing just that. Anyone reading this article will likely have a LinkedIn account qualifying them to know at least a little about the concept of supply versus demand. It is one of the most basic and fundamental business concepts in existence and when you relate this to the airline industry, things start to become a little scary for the majority of us.

The simple statistical fact of the matter is this, the number of passengers booking a ticket will increase by 50% over the next ten years. In twenty years from now passenger numbers will have doubled, that’s a 100% increase from today. Anyone who has flown from Manchester airport recently will not like the prospect of those security check-in queues! However, the problem is going to take far more than the improvement of an airports recruitment strategy. There are two key restricting factors to meeting the projected demand in airline travel. Number one, aeroplanes (or airplanes for our cousins across the water).

The Airbus A380 is the biggest commercial aeroplane in our skies but it is a rare bird to spot. Despite the love shown by Emirates sales from other airlines were not coming in. In 2021 Airbus stopped producing these enormous yet majestic people carriers. As of today, Airbus only plans to produce their wide bodied A330 and A350 and a single aisle A320 and A220, none of which come close to the A380. For context, the A380 has the capacity for 469 passengers whereas the A330 and A350 have the capacity for 292 and 331 passenger respectively. The closest to the A380 outside of Airbus is the Boeing 777x which can seat a respectable 426 passengers. Currently Boeing have less than a handful of these in the air so there’s little hope of these helping out in the fight to supply the two fold increase in passenger numbers. So what we know today is that planes aren’t getting bigger so the only way to meet passenger demand without creating exclusivity will be to increase the number of planes in the sky. Incidentally, they can’t do this if it means doubling the amount of Co2 emissions released into the atmosphere. Fortunately we are in luck and hopefully the Costa del Sol isn’t going to be out of reach for us anytime soon. Airbus are preparing to increase production of their A320 which will see 50% more planes available for European and other short haul destinations. What’s more, they along with Boeing have partnered with Sheffield University and their AMRC research development facility (Advanced Manufacturing Research Centre) to find new ways of surfing the skies that are cheaper and more environmentally friendly through advanced material and propulsion technologies. So if the manufacturers of aeroplanes can keep up with demand, what’s the second issue?

Airports! As mentioned earlier, some airports cannot cope with the current level of flights and passenger numbers. So what are they doing in preparation for our future? Unsurprisingly, technology is our answer here. How many of us have been though the rigmarole of airport check-in and security clearance and thought, I could implement a better system than this? It wouldn’t be hard, I’m sure many of us could submit ideas that would improve the process. Thankfully airports have started to take a serious approach to improving what should be an enjoyable experience, but in fact is one filled with anxiety and trepidation. It will not be long until biometric screening is done at the point of check-in and your baggage is RF received to avoid it being lost (the same technology that tracks millions of items in your local Amazon warehouse in real time). At the same time computed tomography units will provide digital verification of carry-on bags using autonomous 3D image review software which will prevent the need to physically check your baggage. Elements of these technologies are currently in use in the Far East and the US. It is only a matter of time before it is all brought together as a new standardised system of airport check-in and clearance. This is great news for passengers who can celebrate an end to long queues and waiting at the start of every holiday or business trip. However, it still doesn’t solve the issue of passengers increasing by 100%. Airports are currently operating close to capacity meaning they will need to find new ways for getting passengers off the ground or risk returning air travel to an exclusive luxury for the wealthy.

As you are reading this there are roughly 11,000 planes in the sky, a typical day sees around 100,000 planes take off worldwide. Nobody foreseen this level of air traffic 100 years ago when commercial air travel took off. Passenger numbers have steadily increased year on year since the 1920s with the exception of the years around WW2 and the recent Covid-19 pandemic. The rate or growth and the rate of airport expansions have slipped and with the momentum now behind post pandemic passenger growth it is perhaps too late for airports to catch up. This means it doesn’t really matter how many planes Boeing and Airbus make, it will just result in passengers waiting around in swanky new terminals waiting for a departure slot. To solve all these problems airports will need to increase their number of runways. This sound straight forward enough but the UK’s largest and most over capacity airport is London Heathrow. A proposal for their third runway was made thirteen years ago back in 2009 and has still not been approved. It is estimated that Heathrow will get a third runway but it will not be ready until at least 2028. That’s almost a decade in the making and that’s just one airport in the UK. For airlines to be able to keep up with consumer demand across the world there will need to be extremely quick and efficient actions taken within the next five years. This looks unlikely and the outcome will be a reduced availability of flights against demand which means prices will soar higher than the A380 Airbus that was needed to help win this fight.