Boeing trims airline market forecasts

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FILE PHOTO: FILE PHOTO: The Boeing logo is pictured at the LABACE fair in Sao Paulo

US AIRPLANE maker Boeing has trimmed its projected industrywide demand for airplanes over the next 20 years, but said it expects deliveries to be stable excluding the Russian market.

Boeing projects airlines worldwide will need 41,170 new airplanes over 20 years with half of the deliveries for replacement aircraft, and with single-aisle aircraft accounting for about 75 per cent of planes.

Boeing’s new market outlook, released yesterday ahead of the Farnborough Airshow, is down from its previous rolling 20-year-forecast of 43,610 deliveries.
The new estimate excludes the Russian market and its projection of 1,540 airplanes because of the war in Ukraine and uncertainty about when manufacturers could again sell planes to Russian carriers.

Boeing still projects the global airline fleet by 2041 will nearly double as it expects a Covid-19 recovery in worldwide aviation demand by early 2024.
Over the next two decades, Boeing said “long-term fundamentals remain intact”.

“Our view of medium-term recovery – when the industry gets back to 2019 levels of global airline traffic — is largely unchanged” since 2020, Hulst said. “Overall, we still see late 2023, early 2024 as the time where the industry recovers to full or at least the level of pre-pandemic traffic.”

Boeing expects strong near-term demand for aircraft despite recession risks.

“The global industry is still on a recovery trajectory back to where the normal relationship of GDP and traffic would be,” Hulst said.

“Any small blip from an economy standpoint would be probably overwhelmed by the demand that exists as a result of those normal economic relationships.”

Boeing also projects the freighter fleet will grow 80 per cent by 2041. Air cargo is performing at “historic levels”, Hulst said, saying it is in part “a function of the increasing strategic value of air cargo relative to supply chains that are challenged and shipping that is challenged”.
Boeing sees e-commerce networks as helping to drive a “strategic shift to air cargo even into the medium and long term… This isn’t just a blip in terms of shipping versus air”.

Reuters