OAG reports that North America (U.S./Canada; they seem to include Mexico in Central/South America) has become the world’s third largest commercial aviation market, with 99 million airline seats. Asia Pacific is number one with 109.6 million and Europe is number two with 105.5 million (press release).
4 thoughts on “We’re Number Three”
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So? Both APac and the EU have higher populations than US/Canada. Isn’t less wealth disparity around the world a good thing?
David: I think that there are a couple of interesting things about the data. Europe, for example, obviously does have a larger population than North America. However, many countries within Europe are not very wealthy, the distances are short, the inter-country business connections are less intensive than inter-state connections within the U.S., and the train system is more comprehensive. So one would expect Europe to have less airline capacity. I wonder if part of the answer is the Europe has some airlines, e.g., Ryanair, that are vastly more efficient than the average U.S. carrier and even substantially more efficient than our Southwest and JetBlue. The U.S. still has a lot of barriers to competition, e.g., gate lock-up at the most desirable airports, that keep airfares high. If we hope to get out of our economic doldrums, we might want to figure out how the Europeans are able to travel more efficiently. (Africa has very high travel costs and it does not seem to have helped economic growth.)
As far as the Asia data goes, I think it is interesting because so many Americans have a preconception of Asia as not having a significant middle class. The fact that Asians can support nearly 110 million airline seats indicates that many of our conceptions about Asia will have to be reexamined.
The question also has to include whether the seat growth in Europe is mainly business or leisure use. Many Europeans have a lot more paid time off than Americans, some of which may be spent on a 1 Euro Ryanair fare. That could well have been a major reason for growth in the past decade.
Ryanair flies to few major airports, usually flying to rather inconvenient secondary airports. (Which is why I rarely flew with them, preferring EasyJet, which costs little more and I consider a few hours less travel time more valuable than a GBP20 lower fare on a weekend trip.) Is that what Southwest and Jet Blue do?
Traveling the US, I also notice every airline pretty much has their own terminal. Do the major airports also have “generic” terminals a smaller airline might use?
Bas: JetBlue and Southwest started out at the less convenient airports, e.g., JetBlue going to Long Beach rather than LAX and Southwest going to Providence, Rhode Island and Manchester, New Hampshire rather than Boston. With the collapse of the U.S. economy, however, the discount carriers have been able to break into some of the previously closed-off airports. The legacy carriers, however, have been successful at keeping the low-cost carriers down to a minimal presence at the prime airports, such as Washington D.C.’s National Airport and New York’s LaGuardia.