The bigger aircraft manufacturers present on a regular basis their long term outlook for the aviation market and just like with what ACI World presented earlier this year the outlook looks very solid.
Following the recent publication of the Airbus long term forecast, there are quite some remarkable elements which we wanted to put in the spotlight in this article.
- The correlation between income and travel is critical, with more income also comes the possibility for people – that never travelled before – to start traveling and this is made very clear in the graphic above.
- The strongest growth – correlating with the first graphic above – will come from Asia and China, almost covering 50% of all aircraft sales by 2043
- The strongest growth for widebody aircraft (in % compared to the total sales) will reside in the Middle East
- Cargo will continue to grow and closely follow GDP growth with express air cargo to surpass general cargo.
- Sustainability will become more and more important but there will not be one single solution to decarbonize aviation, with an important remark related to SAF or Sustainable Aviation Fuels as flying with 100% SAF reduces lifecycle CO2 emissions by an average of 80% when compared to traditional aviation fuel and that the replacement of older aircraft could already yield a saving of about 25% on CO2 emissions.
To realize all these growth figures, there are also a lot of challenges and needs of an operational nature, from the need for upgraded aircraft systems, optimized flight trajectories, decarbonized on-ground operations and air traffic management overall.
These are critical elements where many of the Air tech Italy members can contribute through offers ranging from AI driven analytics to electrical ground vehicles and state of the art traffic management solutions.
While the report is very optimistic, it also lists a series of uncertainties that can weigh on the predictions:
- Macroeconomics like GDP, trade, demography, inflation, energy
- Ticket prices incl. fuel price and other operating costs
- Geopolitics
- Regulations and
- Network, infrastructure and operations
In all a very interesting report that shines a (mostly) rosy picture about the industry, its outlook and its challenges but fact remains that aviation is not going away and will increase its impact on society.
The full report can be downloaded here.