Delivering the strongest business insights in the world of commercial aviation.
Welcome, Istanbul, to the distinguished club of cities with at least 100m airline passengers annually. In the 12 months to November, the city’s main Atatürk airport, together with its secondary Sabiha Gökçen airport, handled almost 102m passengers, up 8% y/y and a record for the city over a 12-month period. This means Istanbul will certainly […]
With a new year underway, we’re thinking about what will happen in 2019—always a dicey proposition. In this episode, we consider the prospects of airlines around the world. Some, like Aeroflot and Turkish Airlines, are facing huge opportunities. Others, like Jet Airways and South African Airlines, are facing grave challenges. Will the International Airlines Group […]
Radical reconstructive surgery? Not quite. No new hubs. No newly shuttered hubs. No mass route closures. But make no mistake: United’s network strategy is changing in meaningful ways. It’s no mystery why. For five straight years, from 2013 through 2017, United was the bottom-dweller among America’s Big Three airlines, measured by annual operating margin. The […]
Was 2018 a good year or a bad year? Speaking collectively, airlines can’t complain. As IATA pointed out last week, industry profits should hit about $32b this year, good for a 7% operating margin. This 7% comfortably exceeds the sector’s cost of capital. But IATA isn’t throwing any parties. That might sound like a lot […]
After pummeling each other for years, Icelandair and Wow Air agreed to a truce in the form of a merger. But the merger fell through. Now Wow Air may be finding comfort with serial airline investor Indigo Partners. What will that mean for both airlines? Aeroflot apparently finds comfort in being big. In fact, the […]
