The Airline Industry
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In order to understand how new aircraft might fit into the current market, one must understand the customer. For commercial transport aircraft manufacturers, the customers are the airlines. For business aircraft, military programs, or recreational aircraft, the market behaves quite differently.
The following discussion, intended to provide an example of an up-to-date view of one market, is excerpted from the British Airways web site, Jan. 2000. See also the excellent market outlooks published by Boeing and Airbus each year -- for example: Boeing Current Market Outlook (1MB pdf) and Airbus Global Market Forecast (2.5 MB pdf).
INDUSTRY OVERVIEW
Air travel remains a large and growing industry. It facilitates economic growth, world trade, international investment and tourism and is therefore central to the globalization taking place in many other industries.
In the past decade, air travel has grown by 7% per year. Travel for both business and leisure purposes grew strongly worldwide. Scheduled airlines carried 1.5 billion passengers last year. In the leisure market, the availability of large aircraft such as the Boeing 747 made it convenient and affordable for people to travel further to new and exotic destinations. Governments in developing countries realized the benefits of tourism to their national economies and spurred the development of resorts and infrastructure to lure tourists from the prosperous countries in Western Europe and North America. As the economies of developing countries grow, their own citizens are already becoming the new international tourists of the future.
Business travel has also grown as companies become i ...