European airlines watched with horror last week as Gulf carriers ordered another 400 widebody aircraft, auguring huge competitive capacity increases. Worse yet, all this demand for new planes is pushing up aircraft ownership costs for airlines everywhere—even Ryanair, which normally...
Read MoreFootball fans know that history is replete with teams that looked on paper to be among the greatest ever assembled but then failed miserably to live up to expectations. Airline fans can likewise rattle off a litany of past mergers...
Read MoreFor one airline after another—in geographies as diverse as Brazil and Australia, India and Hawaii, Japan and Europe—a silent killer is on the loose. This time it’s not fuel, the global market for which is actually softening. It’s not a...
Read MoreTen years ago, in the fall of 2003, the U.S. airline industry was in crisis. The fallout from the 9/11 attacks hadn’t fully dissipated. The U.S. economy was just emerging from recession. War in Iraq was sapping demand for international...
Read MoreOne sign an airline market matters: it has service from each of the Gulf’s Big Three. Sure enough, Vietnam got its third of the three, Etihad, earlier this month, punctuating a remarkable five-year run for a country that was long...
Read MoreRyanair wields perhaps the harshest stick in the entire global airline industry. But the carrot can be just as dramatic. Last week the ultra-low-cost carrier announced that beginning in April, it will bring more than a million new passengers through...
Read MoreTouting two new markets last week, United released a statement that, well, sounded like any other: “We look forward to giving travelers in Atlanta convenient access to this country’s best and broadest trans-Pacific network at United’s San Francisco hub, and...
Read MoreIn 2005, the government of struggling Samoa decided its taxpayers had more pressing needs than endless subsidies for state-owned Polynesian Airlines. So Samoa accepted an offer from a promising and profitable Australian low-cost carrier called Virgin Blue, which put up...
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