2025 A YEAR OF CHALLENGES FOR AIR TRANSPORT

This year again, many challenges await air transport. It ended 2024 in a very sad way with the crash of the South Korean company Jeju Air, which killed 179 people following, if we understood the first investigations, a bird ingestion and the explosion of the aircraft, a Boeing 737-800, against a wall at the end of the runway while the crew had not managed to extend the landing gear. This accumulation of bad luck is expected to be explained through the investigation, as the black boxes have been recovered.

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

The other major challenge is aircraft manufacturing. Demand for transportation 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 constantly expanding market despite the ecological obstacles to its growth, it will be necessary to have planes and pilots in unprecedented numbers. By 2035, in just ten years, 400,000 pilots will have to be trained and some 40,000 aircraft built. However, the new aircraft are becoming more and more sophisticated, and their construction requires a growing number of players: more than 400 subcontractors for each of the two main manufacturers.

These manufacturers—Airbus, Boeing, Embraer, Comac, and ATR—are struggling to keep up with the pace of airline orders. Airlines, fearful of not being able to transport their market and leaving room for competitors, plan their operating programs several years in advance based on the delivery dates of the aircraft ordered. However, these are very unlikely to be met, at least until Boeing has returned to full production capacity, which is not a foregone conclusion this year.

Let’s not forget the considerable ecological challenge that has penalized this sector of activity for a good ten years. Admittedly, environmental issues have been weighing on carriers and airports for longer than that. Residents of airport areas would like to take advantage of the well-paid job opportunities without being subjected to the slightest noise. But ecology has become a global issue, at least for Western countries governed by democratic systems and therefore dependent on pressure groups, particularly ecological ones.

Of course, air transport must relentlessly pursue its decarbonization objective, and this will cost colossal sums that 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 public, because that is the challenge. To do this, it needs to bring together all the players, from travel agents to air traffic controllers, airports, airlines, manufacturers, service providers, and so on. For now, there is no sign of the emergence of a fund-raising organization capable of creating effective global lobbying. Creating such a tool as early as 2025 would be highly desirable.

Airports will also be confronted with the management of growth, while their government environment, largely influenced by the environmental lobby, has only one goal: to reduce the number of movements. Already, some major platforms are affected by purely administrative restrictions, such as Amsterdam Schiphol and Paris Orly, to speak only of Europe. They will not be able to defend their position on their own, but they can be the driving forces behind the creation of the global lobby that is clearly needed.

There remains one last challenge: tariffs. Airfares have increased significantly after Covid, and that is a good thing. The recent, totally unforeseen accidents show that air transport is an extremely complex activity that cannot be sold with fares that do not respect its value. The big sales campaigns put it in the public's head that air transport is ultimately worth nothing since it can be bought at incredibly low prices. This does a great disservice to the industry. The challenge could be to ban below-cost fares once and for all, even if it is to fill the last seat of the flights.

In short, air transport is not yet at the end of its road to the quality to which it is so deeply committed.