Weatherwatcher1 wrote:seahawk wrote:Have you looked at the predictions? More and more analysts expect air travel to not return to a normal state before 2022 and demand to not reach 2019 levels again before 2024-2027 and that only if there are no additional negative factors and if the virus is of no concern for the customers at the end of 2021. Which means a working vaccine would have to be applied world wide. New airliners are not needed at the moment. Corona was Black Swan event way worse than 9-11 and the financial crisis combined.
I think you are right. If airlines aren’t growing, they don’t need more planes, so they won’t buy new planes. They can use the airplanes that they have and retire the older or less efficient planes. I don’t see airlines buying new planes when the price on used airplanes is collapsing.
Research and development is paid for from profit. The doom and gloom crowd can say the ship is sailing and the end is near. Fortunately Boeing has military and space programs to keep them afloat. Those are the programs likely to want new products and thus money will probably go there.
I have my doubts that Airbus will debt fund development that will put Boeing too far behind. Boeing already leads widebodies. Airbus is working on stabilizing their production since the A220 is losing money (source: https://www.washingtonpost.com/business ... story.html) , A321neo production is way behind schedule, and the A321XLR is still 3 years away. In general Airbus isn’t in a good financial position to launch a new airplane either after losing more money in 2019 than Boeing did, so Boeing taking time to see how the market changes probably makes sense. Airline consolidations could change what the next plane looks like.
I would not say gloom and doom, I would say uncertainty. the simple problem is that nobody knows when demand will pick-up again, how fast it will pick-up again and also how the demand will look. With cooperations investing serious amount of money into teleconferencing and their IT infrastructure to reduce the need to travel, it is more than likely that they will try to make use of that infrastructure after the virus crisis, so we can easily see less business demand. If countries make travelling harder (say VISAs and an up-to-date and negative Corona test result for entry) we would see even less travel and many regions might be fighting the virus a lot longer than others. Airlines will struggle for the next years and i can not really see any appetite to become the launch customer for a new plane that would be aiming at filling a gap, a gap airlines are widening in their fleets at the moment with early retirements of 757s and 767s.