Originally Posted by
sheepless
Northern Monkey - Apologies for being downbeat...I would hope that the modelling plays out.
"A 40% drop in global revenue passenger miles followed by a rapid snap-back and leveling out of 5% year-over-year growth starting in 2023". But..
Looking at the CFMU portal - Europe has gone from around 24000 movements a day to around 4000. The remaining 4000 includes freighters so the actual decrease in pax is massive.
At the other end of the world NZ has gone to handfuls of passengers a day during lock down. If/When countries get control they will likely impose restrictions for some time.
Singapore, as a hub, is a good one to watch. They have avoided lock down, for the moment. The airline and airport are effectively not operating. Daily cases have always been low.
The bounce back will be the key, but when. There are probably no models for this scenario. Will people want to travel. Will they have the money to travel.
The simple model says this kills 2% of the people. Maybe half of those people did not fly anyway. Clearly it is not that simple.
The numbers we have at the moment are useless. The data is garbage.
Since we don't know the extent of community transmission, we cannot know the true death rate or the true serious complication rate. In the UK, we are only testing people admitted to hospital with respiratory symptoms. So the death rate as a proportion of those cases is going to be much higher than the true death rate. The same is true for
nearly every other country out there. There will be large numbers of asymptomatic or mild cases in the community which do not form part of the official statistics. When all that is taken into account, I would bet at least a months salary on the eventual death rate being under 1%. Possibly under 0.5%.
As to your other point, will people want to travel, will people have the money to travel? As soon as we have a vaccine or an effective anti-viral and the restrictions can be lifted on every day life, people will want to travel again. I've used zoom video conferencing this week and despite it being a laugh to have a few beers with your mates, it doesn't come close to meeting someone face to face. So business travel will come back. As for leisure travel, are we really saying that generation selfie won't want to go to the Eiffel Tower, or NYC, or for their gap year adventures in Thailand? I think not.
There is definitely a bigger question about whether they will have the money to travel, at least initially. I do think for a while there will be less flying as people prioritise putting their day to day finances back in order. It will probably take a couple of years to get back to any kind of normal. Now is not the time to start training to be a pilot, despite whatever CAE/L3/FTE may tell you.
Back to the title of the thread, should easyjet cancel its airbus order? I would argue that it shouldn't cancel entirely but should defer as much as possible and reduce the size of the order if possible. There will be opportunities for well placed airlines to do well in a few years from now as capacity comes out of the market and smaller companies either fail or are taken over. It would be foolish to throw the baby out with the bathwater.