Boeing 737 Max order cancellations indicate low air traffic for years

I was reading a Forbes article about an aircraft leasing company that is one of Boeing’s largest customer cancelling 737 Max orders, and I ran across this from a travel industry marketing analyst:

Adam Pilarski, a consultant with Avitas who has warned for years that airlines were ordering too many planes during the boom times of the last decade, expects that airline traffic won’t return to 2019 levels until 2023, a forecast in line with many other observers.

My guests come to Alaska by ferry or by air, and all of my foreign guests have flown into the US or Canada.

I think that he’s right, and the worldwide travel market won’t even start to recover until there is a COVID-19 vaccine, and won’t really recover until hard hit economies do.

What say you?

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If it was any other plane, I’d be concerned. :wink:

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It’s lucky that many other planes are manufactured where regulation is heavy and can be trusted.
I myself can’t wait to fly from Europe to America as soon as possible but I’ll probably won’t fly Boeing. The NYT had a great piece some time ago about the poor oversight and the lacking quality control of their planes build in the South. It’s profit over safety for some American companies.

I absolutely agree and hope I’m wrong. Here’s a big problem: (warning politics ahead!) we still don’t have a nationwide shutdown. Bill Gates (kind of an expert on this kind of thing and economics) is saying we could be in good shape in 10 weeks if we had a nationwide shutdown. He specifically calls out movement from place to place (aka travel) a problem. As everyone can see, we don’t even have the right mindset. A nationwide Chinese/Spanish/Italian lockdown can’t end if it hasn’t even started.

On top of that international travel isn’t going to recover until there is a vaccine in widespread use. One thing the president is willing to do is shut the doors to foreigners. He’s already said Americans should travel around the US and spend their money here.

Fear at least until a vaccine…I don’t know what effect that will have but it’s bound to have one.

The economy…even when it’s safe to travel who can afford it? It’s a luxury in the best of times.

So I say at least two years.

To add a layer—companies are being forced to rethink how they do business. Skype, MS Teams, Zoom have replaced face to face meetings. The company I work for is already challenging us to think ahead on how to use these same techniques and recommend changes to existing processes to sustain the efficiency.

My job is 50% travel. There are elements of my job that have transitioned to be web based. I think as client companies become more receptive to change there will be less work travel required.

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Also travel is bad for the environment. So once we recover fully from this that will be the next challenge. For someone that is in their 60s or 70s we may get another 10-15 good years. No way I would want to be 30-50’s trying to make a lifelong living in the travel industry, especially not if it were dependent on air travel.

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