The Airline Profit Cycle

The air transport industry has high economic impact; it supports more than 60 million jobs worldwide. Since the early years of commercial air travel, passenger numbers have grown tremendously. However, for decades airlines’ financial results have been swinging between profits and losses. The airline industry’s aggregate net average profit between 1970 and 2010 was close to zero, which implies bankruptcies and layoffs in downturns. The profit cycle’s amplitude has been rising over time, which means that problems have become increasingly severe and also shows that the industry may not have learned from the past. More stable financial results could not only facilitate airline management decisions and improve investors’ confidence but also preserve employment. This book offers a thorough understanding of the airline profit cycle’s causes and drivers, and it presents measures to achieve a higher and more stable profitability level. This is the first in-depth examination of the airline profit cycle. The airline industry is modelled as a complex dynamic system, which is used for quantitative simulations of ‘what if’ scenarios. These experiments reveal that the general economic environment, such as GDP or fuel price developments, influence the airline industry’s profitability pattern as well as certain regulations or aircraft manufactures’ policies. Yet despite all circumstances, simulations show that airlines’ own management decisions are sufficient to generate higher and more stable profits in the industry. This book is useful for aviation industry decision makers, investors, policy makers, and researchers because it explains why the airline industry earns or loses money. This knowledge will advance forecasting and market intelligence. Furthermore, the book offers practitioners different suggestions to sustainably improve the airline industry’s profitability. The book is also recommended as a case study for system analysis as well as industry cyclicality at graduate or postgraduate level for courses such as engineering, economics, or management.

Since the enactment of the Airline Deregulation Act in 1978, questions that had been at the heart of the ongoing debate about the industry for eighty years gained a new intensity: Is there enough competition among airlines to ensure that passengers do not pay excessive fares? Can an unregulated airline industry be profitable? Is air travel safe? While economic regulation provided a certain stability for both passengers and the industry, deregulation changed everything. A new fare structure emerged; travelers faced a variety of fares and travel restrictions; and the offerings changed frequently. In the last fifteen years, the airline industry's earnings have fluctuated wildly. New carriers entered the industry, but several declared bankruptcy, and Eastern, Pan Am, and Midway were liquidated. As financial pressures mounted, fears have arisen that air safety is being compromised by carriers who cut costs by skimping on maintenance and hiring inexperienced pilots. Deregulation itself became an issue with many critics calling for a return to some form of regulation. In this book, Steven A. Morrison and Clifford Winston assert that all too often public discussion of the issues of airline competition, profitability, and safety take place without a firm understanding of the facts. The policy recommendations that emerge frequently ignore the long-run evolution of the industry and its capacity to solve its own problems. This book provides a comprehensive profile of the industry as it has evolved, both before and since deregulation. The authors identify the problems the industry faces, assess their severity and their underlying causes, and indicate whether government policy can play an effective role in improving performance. They also develop a basis for understanding the industry's evolution and how the industry will eventually adapt to the unregulated economic environment. Morrison and Winston maintain that although the airline industry has not reached long-run equilibrium, its evolution is proceeding in a positive direction—one that will preserve and possibly enhance the benefits of deregulation to travelers and carriers. They conclude that the federal government's primary policy objective should be to expand the benefits from unregulated market forces to international travel. Brookings Review article also available

There are few industries that have had a more profound impact on business and society over the last century than aviation. This book is an accessible, up-to-date introduction to the current state of the aviation industry which provides readers with the tools necessary to understand the volatile and often complicated nature of airline finance. Understanding finance is critical in any industry; however, the financial track record of the airline industry places even more importance on effective financial management. Foundations of Airline Finance provides an introduction to the basics of finance – including time value of money, the valuation of assets, and revenue management – and the particular intricacies of airline finance where there can be wild fluctuations in both revenues and costs. The third edition of this text has been extensively updated to reflect the many changes in the air transport industry that have taken place since the publication of the second edition, and features an expanded chapter on aircraft leasing and many new international case examples. This thorough introduction to aviation finance is valuable reading as a general, introductory financial text, or as reading in specialized airline finance classes.

This book examines the connection between profitability and product quality in the airline industry, and how it affects safety performance. Nancy L. Rose, a professor at the Sloan School of Management, provides a comprehensive analysis of the economic determinants of airline safety performance. Using extensive data, she demonstrates that there is a positive relationship between airline profitability and safety performance. This book is essential reading for anyone interested in the airline industry or safety management. This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work is in the "public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant.

Essay from the year 2012 in the subject Business economics - Business Management, Corporate Governance, Northumbria University, course: Bachelor of Arts in Human Resources Management, language: English, abstract: The commercial airline is an extremely competitive, safety-sensitive, high technology service industry. People, employees and customers, not products and machines, must be an arena of organization's core competence. Sustaining airline profitability, ensuring safety and security, and developing adequate air transportation infrastructure are the important challenges to the airlines. In the following chapters, the strategic reasons that lead Singapore Airline (SIA) success will be discuss with strategic frameworks.

The airline industry has come a long way since deregulation in 1978. Yet its ROI to investors is lowest among all industries. This book provides the secrets of how advanced analytics helps profit optimization. It is written with candor to show the limitations of today's most widely used systems and how new futuristic systems are needed for optimized decision making. It describes the systems, process and governance that align the entire management from the CEO down to the managers in making profitable decisions every time. Using numerous cases from the commercial functions of sales, revenue management, marketing and network planning, the book provides an insider look into the sub-optimal decision processes today. It shows how embedding advanced analytics from enterprise perspective optimizes the decisions. It provides a playbook for the CIO and C-Suite to build and ensure governance of the models, data and process for enterprise analytics. Commercial airlines that adopt the advanced analytics paradigm shift will see direct competitive advantage and lasting change in profits. This is the type of change recommended by Gopal Ranganathan, industry consultant and founder of Quad Optima Analytics, a company dedicated to helping airlines have this advantage.