Paris Air Show organizers promised a feel-good factor from this year’s event, staged at Le Bourget Airport from June 20 to 26, and clearly they were in the know as to the deluge of new business coming their way. Airline bosses pitched up in the French capital with seemingly open checkbooks to order well over $100 billion worth of new aircraft and engines.
Unsurprisingly, much of the new business originated from carriers in key emerging markets such as India, China and South America. But a fair crop of new orders also came from airlines in regions that are not experiencing such prolific growth curves, such as the U.S. and Europe. The rising wave of fleet modernization and expansion appears doubly startling when one considers the current state of airline profitability, or rather the general lack thereof. Last month, IATA cut its profits projections for member carriers in 2011 by 54 percent, predicting a combined trading surplus of $4 billion, compared with the $8.6 billion it had envisioned as recently as last March.
