PPRuNe Forums - View Single Post - Who will survive this and be here in 6 months ?
Old 16th Mar 2020, 11:58
  #141 (permalink)  
ORAC
Ecce Homo! Loquitur...
 
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Returning to the question of the OP.....

Airlines appealing for governments to provide financial support. Should it be given? The following article makes the case why they shouldn't. I am reminded of the early days of the railways in the UK. A major bubble which burst after thousands of miles had been built and on which the investors lost their money - but the lines and trains remained and were snapped up by the next generation of investors without the burden of the debts.

https://capx.co/airlines-are-on-thei...one-direction/

.......Whatever happens in the next few weeks, in the long term we can expect the world to keep getting richer, meaning travel is going to continue to grow. It is, in the jargon of economists, a superior or luxury good. As incomes rise, more of the rising income is spent on the item. Wibbles about the 2% of CO2 emissions that aviation accounts for is pretty unlikely to change that.

Nor will the current providers going bust change things either. These are, at the heart of it, merely organisations. The actual assets aren’t going to be destroyed, and there will still be the same number of pilots to operate the things. Similarly, there will be about the same number of planes – barring Boeing having problems again with a new model. Airports already exist and they’re not going to evaporate as with tinned goods off the shelves. Essentially, all of the kit, equipment and infrastructure will still exist, even if the industry has gone through a period of profound turmoil.

That will certainly be difficult for staff who lose their jobs, and the owners whose companies have gone up in smoke. Still, with spare planes, crews and runways plus that still existing desire to go see the world, new companies are sure to spring up to fill the gaps left by the companies that have gone under. Say’s Law, that supply creates demand, isn’t really wholly true. But the inverse, that demand calls forth supply of something technically possible, is. Especially when the landscape is littered with the supplies necessary to make it possible.

However many airlines go bust in this difficult time it’s simply not going to change, in any medium or long term sense, the general ability to fly off somewhere. Simply because it’s observably true that people like doing it, it’s known how to do it, therefore it will be done by those eager to profit.

The worse it becomes for extant – and soon not to be extant – airlines the easier it will be in the near future for a new one to be set up by any would-be entrepreneur with a bit of get up and go. After all, whatever the fallout of this dreadful period, Covid-19 is surely not going to kill off the greed of capitalists?
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