The chief executive of Spirit Airlines suspects his carrier will recover from the coronavirus downturn faster than major US carriers, though the pace of Spirit’s long-term fleet-growth plan remains uncertain. “I think the future is still bright,” CEO Ted Christie says during the Boyd Group International’s Aviation Forecast Summit, held this week in Cincinnati. “We view this particular environment as more of a speed bump than a paradigm shift.” Christie attributes his relative optimism to Spirit’s focus on carrying leisure travellers, a segment he and industry observers suspect will rebound faster than business and long-haul international travel. “Our leisure segment will come back faster than traditional corporate travel,” Christie adds. “I don’t think its long-term impaired in any way.” Domestic and international routes to leisure destinations undergird Spirit’s network. The carrier also targets “visiting friends and relatives” travellers, another leisure segment. Its international flights include those to warm-weather Caribbean destinations and Central- and South American cities. The industry has never experienced an event like the Covid-19 pandemic, but Christie finds similarities with past events, such as the early 1990s Gulf War, the 2001 terrorist attacks, and oil price spikes. “A similar theme in all cases was that the leisure travel tended to be the most resilient during the crisis and the first to come out." Christie says Spirit will keep its network flexible, and has ability to shift rapidly, adding or removing flights as market conditions demand. He does not, however, predict when Spirit’s network will return to pre-coronavirus levels. The company operated 550 flights in July, down from 750 daily in pre-pandemic times. Observers have speculated that the broader global airline industry will not fully recover for four years or more. The pandemic has led Spirit to ground Airbus A319 aircraft, at least temporarily, and to delivery of new Airbus A320neo-family jets that it previously expected to receive this year and early next year. The airline will now take those jets in 2023 and 2024. Spirit has received 16 new Airbus jets this year and will not receive more in 2020, Christie says. Previously, Spirit had planned to receive 23 or 24 of those jets this year, Christie says. The company’s agreements with Airbus enable Spirit to convert its Airbus orders to the smaller A220, though potential adjustments will depend on opportunities that develop and the pace of recovery, Christie says.

Source: Cirium

Could the coronavirus pandemic cause a long-term bump in air travel from small- and medium-size airports? Delta Air Lines thinks it might. Work-at-home policies and related Covid-19 factors have already led many Americans to relocate their lives from larger to smaller cities, says Delta senior vice-president of network planning Joe Esposito. “Now big cities are getting smaller,” Esposito says during the Boyd Group International’s Aviation Forecast Summit on 12 October. “The forecast of where people live and move has changed. We are writing that new forecast.” He notes, for instance, that many New Yorkers are moving to smaller cities like Syracuse, and to towns in Connecticut and New Jersey. Others are moving to Florida. “Some people don’t want to live in New York City,” Esposito says. “New York may not come back for more years than we’d like.” Delta in recent years pulled out of some smaller cities and reduced its regional network. In 2011, for instance, eight regional airlines operated 1.2 million flights for Delta. By 2019, that figure had slipped 32%, to 812,000 flights operated by six regional airlines, according to Cirium fleets data. Currently, only three regional carriers – Endeavor Air, Republic Airways and SkyWest Airlines – operate regional aircraft for Delta. Esposito says changing market conditions could lead Delta in the coming years to assign narrowbody jets to routes currently operated by regional aircraft like Embraer E175s, and to assign those jets to routes operated by Bombardier-built CRJ200s. Questions about shifting demand come as international travel remains badly impacted by the Covid-19 pandemic.“People just can’t move internationally,” Esposito says, citing travel restrictions and threats of quarantine. “We have to be really, really careful about how we deploy international… We have to do it at a much more measured pace,” he says. “Domestic is coming back much faster than international, and that will likely be the theme in 2021.”

Source: Cirium

Airbus achieved deliveries of 57 aircraft during September, although order activity remained practically non-existent. Its delivery figure is the highest for any single month so far in 2020, exceeding the 55 achieved in February, just before the onset of the air transport crisis. The only order change registered was the reduction of Macquarie Financial Holdings’ order for 40 A220-300s, which has been revised to 37. Airbus has total orders for 545 A220-300s and a further 94 for the smaller A220-100. It has yet to record the agreement for six A220s in the recently unveiled corporate jet version. The airframer kept its net order figure at 300 for the first nine months of the year – which is actually more than double the 127 it had achieved at the same point in 2019, when the commercial business was heavily affected by cancellations. Airbus’s deliveries so far this year total 341 aircraft including 32 A350s and nine A330s, plus 282 A320-family jets and 18 A220s. This figure is just over 40% lower than the 571 deliveries carried out over the same period in 2019. Seven A350s were handed over in September – two apiece to Cathay Pacific, Delta Air Lines and Virgin Atlantic, plus one to Finnair – along with a pair of A330-900s, both for Delta.