2025 a year of challenges for air transport [Par Jean-Louis Baroux]

This year again, many challenges await air transport. It also ended 2024 in a very sad way with the crash of the South Korean company Jeju Air which left 179 dead following, if we correctly understood the first investigations, an ingestion of birds and the explosion of the aircraft, a Boeing 737-800 against a wall at the end of the runway when the crew had failed to extend the landing gear. This is really an accumulation of bad luck that the investigation will undoubtedly be able to provide the explanations since the black boxes have been found

A week earlier, an Azerbaijan Airlines Embraer 190 was hit by a missile apparently fired by a Russian anti-aircraft battery by mistake. This brings us back to the first challenge in air travel, flight safety. These two accidents, so different both in their cause and in their environment, prove that safety is never completely assured despite the extraordinary progress recorded in this area.

5 billion passengers expected in 2025

The other major challenge relates to aircraft manufacturing. Transport demand has continued to grow and more than 5 billion passengers are expected this year. This represents nearly 10,000 passengers every minute. However, to cope with this continually expanding market despite the ecological brakes placed on its growth, planes and pilots will be needed in unprecedented quantities. By 2035, in just ten years, 400,000 pilots will need to be trained and some 40,000 aircraft built. However, the new aircraft are increasingly sophisticated and their construction requires an increasing number of stakeholders: more than 400 subcontractors for each of the two main manufacturers. And these, I named Airbus and Boeing but also Embraer, Comac and ATR. These manufacturers are struggling to keep up with the pace of orders placed by airlines. The latter are afraid of not being able to transport their market and of leaving room for their competitors. They plan their operating programs several years in advance based on the delivery dates of the devices ordered. However, these have very little chance of being held, at least until Boeing has regained its full production capacity and this is not a given at least this year.

The ecological challenge

And then let’s not forget the considerable ecological challenge which has penalized this sector of activity for a good ten years. Of course, environmental issues have been weighing on carriers and airports for longer than that, whose local residents would like to take advantage of fairly well-paid job opportunities without experiencing the slightest noise. But ecology has become a global issue at least for Western countries managed by democratic systems and therefore dependent on pressure groups, particularly ecological ones. Certainly air transport must relentlessly pursue its objective of decarbonization and this will cost colossal sums which will have to be paid by the users of this means of transport. But it must also organize its communication to defend its position vis-à-vis the populations because that is what is at stake. To do this, however, it needs to bring together all the players, from travel agents to air traffic controllers, including airports, airlines, manufacturers, service providers and so on. Except that for the moment we do not see the emergence of a fundraising organization capable of creating effective global lobbying. It would be more than desirable to create such a tool from 2025.

And then the airports will also be faced with managing growth while their governmental environment, largely influenced by the environmentalist lobby, has only one goal, to reduce the number of movements. Already certain large platforms are affected by purely administrative restrictions, this is the case of Amsterdam Schipol but also of Paris Orly to only speak of Europe. They will not be able to defend their position alone, but they can be the driving forces behind the creation of the global lobby which we clearly see the need for.

The pricing challenge

There remains one last challenge, that of prices. These increased significantly after Covid and that is a good thing. The recent totally unforeseen accidents show that air transport is an extremely complex activity, it cannot be sold with prices that do not respect it. The big sale puts in the public’s mind that air transport is ultimately worthless since it can be purchased at incredibly low prices. This does a great disservice to this sector of activity. The challenge could be to ban once and for all prices displayed below cost, even if it is to fill the last seat of flights.

In short, air transport is not at the end of its journey towards the quality to which it is viscerally attached.

Par Jean-Louis BarouxColumnist