Aviation International News senior correspondent Ian Goold has been involved in aerospace since 1964 and in aviation media for more than 40 years. He enjoyed a 20-year career at Flight International magazine, where he was latterly air-transport editor before turning freelance in 1993. A winner of the European Regions Airline Association Hank McGonagle award for excellence in aerospace journalism and a Royal Aeronautical Society Aerospace Journalist of the Year global&nbsp;award, he has edited or contributed to aerospace and aviation magazines, special publications, and websites in Africa, Asia/Pacific, Europe, the Middle East, and North and South America. Ian entered aerospace as an apprentice at the British Aircraft Corporation at Brooklands (Weybridge), where he worked on production and final assembly lines of the Vickers Super VC10, and BAC One-Eleven , and manufacture of Concorde major sub-assemblies. He subsequently graduated from the BAC Design Training School to work in the airframe structures drawing office (including design of international future projects, such as the Panavia Tornado multi-role combat aircraft) before joining Flight International in 1973. Apart from years of reading aircraft magazines and books, his first direct contact with aviation media had come during the early 1970s when he was involved at Brooklands with the Weybridge Man-powered Aircraft Group, which designed and built the tenth aircraft to fly under purely human power. As an aviation journalist, he has worked at more than&nbsp; 50 of the major biennial&nbsp;global and regional international aerospace industry shows at Le Bourget, Farnborough, Singapore, and Dubai (having missed attending only one "Farnborough" since 1960), plus innumerable NBAA, HAI, (U.S.) AOPA, and EBACE Conventions and ERA Assemblies. His favourite aircraft is the Hawker Hunter, of which – as a schoolboy – he heard hundreds make their first flights from Dunsfold, where also on September 24, 2013, he saw the penultimate landing of the VC10 (happily involving an example of which he had witnessed the maiden takeoff in 1970) a day before the last example made the design's final flight (unless, of course....).

Senior correspondent

Ian Goold

After five years of hard work and great change, airlines expect a projected profit in 2007, according to the International Air Transport Association (IATA). Carriers nearly broke even in 2006 and expect to make $5 billion this year, said director-general Giovanni Bisignani. 
“Five years ago it was a different world. We needed an oil price of less than $20 per barrel to break even and low-cost competition was new and tough.” He said that compared with 2002 “labor productivity is up 56 percent, distribution costs are down 13 percent, nonfuel unit costs are 15 percent lower and average load factors are at a record high of 76 percent.”
Bisignani pointed out that airlines currently are profitable with oil at nearly $70 per barrel. “Airline stocks are up 50 percent over last year, but a reality check is necessary,” he warned. 
“We are a $470 billion industry and a profit of $5 billion is peanuts. We need $40 billion to cover the cost of capital. The industry is $200 billion in debt.”
Accordingly, Bisignani outlined six priorities: to improve safety by 25 percent by the end of next year; to improve security, with greater implementation of biometric identification; to simplify business through greater use of electronic communication; infrastructure providers must become more efficient; there must be greater liberalization permitting airline consolidation; and, finally, air transport must become an industry of low emissions.

Airlines to return to profitability this year

After five years of hard work and great change, airlines expect a projected profit in 2007, according to the International Air Transport Association (IATA)

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