Issue No. 806

A European Wild West as Airlines Eye Opportunities

Mar 15, 2021

European Carriers Look Past This Year to a Changing Airline Market

Pushing Back: Inside This Issue

European airlines are looking beyond the exceptionally bad year they had last year and the possibly grim year this year to a brighter future. Many, like Lufthansa Group, are shuffling the pieces around internally to take advantage of any demand recovery that may occur. Others, like Ryanair, are capitalizing on their leisure-traffic strength to plan for what could be a quite a summer. And all are rushing to fill the vacuum left behind by Norwegian's retrenchment.

Meanwhile, AerCap is set to become the world's largest lessor, with 2,000 aircraft in its portfolio, by acquiring GECAS from General Electric. The once-mighty industrial conglomerate has been steadily shedding its assets, but conventional wisdom held that it would retain GECAS as part of its core aviation unit. Conventional wisdom was wrong, as it happens. Elsewhere in this issue, we look at why U.S. budget carrier Frontier, owned by Indigo, would choose now to go public. Crazy times. There's never a dull moment in this industry.

The Airline Weekly Lounge Podcast

New episodes drop every Thursday and are available wherever you get your podcasts and on AirlineWeekly.com. In the latest podcast, Edward "Ned" Russell and Madhu Unnikrishnan wonder if Frontier is crazy, or crazy like a fox, to go public now, and why does Lufthansa protect its fortress hubs from its own subsidiaries? Listen to the episode.

Verbulence

"In December, we had a little bit of an eye-of-the-hurricane phenomenon here in Brazil, where things had recovered... [now] we’ve had a significant reversal."
Gol Chief Financial Officer Richard Lark

Weekly Skies

Air Transat is seemingly unflummoxed by the possible collapse of its long-planned combo with Air Canada. Despite Canadian sign off on the the latter's acquisition of Montreal-based Transat, the deal remains in limbo following the failure of European authorities to…

Sky Money

Frontier Airlines is the second low-cost carrier in a month to file for an initial public offering, clearly seeing opportunity in the prevailing assumption that affordable leisure travel will rebound first from the pandemic.

Fleet

The crisis has created an uneven recovery where some countries are seeing travel come back faster than others. In response to these disparities, Jetstar will shift six Airbus A320s from its Jetstar Japan unit to Australia for a two- to…

Routes and Networks

Eurowings will open a new base in Berlin on April 1, as the Lufthansa Group aims to capture the expected return of leisure travel this summer.

Feature Story

Stronger, leaner and poised to capture new opportunities — that's the name of the game among Europe carriers. After posting staggering losses similar to their U.S. brethren, nearly every airline is singing something of a more optimistic tune now with…