Aircraft Demand Continues to Drop

Recommended Sources

About Travel Industry

BNET Travel provides daily industry trends and news coverage with insights for managers and executives into all aspects of the travel and tourism industry. In addition to detailed airline and hotel company profiles, we bring you industry analysis on new travel and carrier routes, bankruptcies, mergers, tourism figures, investments and a host of other important business issues.

Bryan Corliss has been doing an excellent job of covering the decline in demand for aircraft here at BNET (Airbus, Boeing), but I thought I’d dip my toe into the discussion today with the latest news on the surge of aircraft heading to the desert.

According to Ascend, there are about 2,300 aircraft parked because they aren’t needed right now. If you’re looking for some context on that number, last year only 1,167 were parked. To put it another way, about 11 percent of the world’s fleet is parked now, nearing the 13 percent that was parked after September 11. It’s not looking any better either. The numbers of parked aircraft will continue to grow.

So if you’ve ever had a good airline idea, this is a great time to be able to find cheap planes to operate it. If it wasn’t for that whole economy meltdown thing . . . .

Tags: Aircraft, Bryan Corliss, Aerospace & Defense, Manufacturing, Brett Snyder

In addition to writing BNET's travel industry blog, Brett Snyder also pens the award-winning consumer travel blog, Cranky Flier. You can follow him on Twitter under the name crankyflier.

BNET User Analysis

Voice your 2cents

Web Buzz:

Linking a public government dataset into the semantic web with RDF

O'Reilly Media - 56 days 11 hours 24 minutes ago

Over the years, every time I have looked at RDF the promise seemed to eclipse the reality. Some things have improved: my blog RDFa: not the flopperooni one would expect? is still pretty much my position. A few months ago (mid 2009), a client wanted to dip their toes in the semantic web. So I took a fresh look at the status quo, and where the...
A&D's Silver Lining: Backlogs

Aviation Week - 175 days 2 hours ago

Which industry has seen a bigger drop in demand during the past year: automobiles, or commercial jets. The sobering answer is jets. But Boeing and Airbus are much, much healthier than General Motors, the once-titanic car builder that filed for bankruptcy protection on June 1. The reason: immense backlogs. Fueled by concurrent demand for...
The Importance of American's Wi-fi Announcement

BNET Travel - 236 days 1 hour 19 minutes ago

Yesterday, Bryan Corliss covered American's decision to put wireless internet access on the bulk of its domestic fleet. It's clearly good news for passengers and for Aircell, the provider of the service, but there's something even more important here. This is the first true validation of the wi-fi model. Look at all the other airlines that have...
How To Get Started With SEO

Small Business SEM - 35 days 3 hours 6 minutes ago

Judging from the amount of inquiries that have come in this year via my contact form, there are a lot of small businesses that are just now starting to dip their toes into this whole SEO thing. I’d love some cold, hard stats to back up what I’ve seen … but short of that, gut [...] This is a post from Matt McGee's blog, Small Business...
What's In a Name? Announcing Truth in Labeling

Forrester - 122 days 23 hours 28 minutes ago

A few days ago, my colleague Chris McClean asked the excellent question, "Is Risk Management Compatible with ERM?" I saw the headline come across my RSS reader and I thought, "Cool! I'd love to read what Chris thinks about enterprise rights management," a technology that I cover as part of my data security coverage. I'd advise you to read his...

BNET TalkbackShare your ideas and expertise on this topic

Subscribe to this discussion via Email or RSS

1

Nicholas Barnard

03/02/09 | Report as spam

RE: Aircraft Demand Continues to Drop

I think its pretty safe to say that the planes that have
been parked for more than 2 years, probably aren't
going to the skies again. How do they decide when a
plane is no longer a plane and when it is just an
organized parts collection?

I'd guess that most of the reduction from 2003-2007
wasn't airplanes going back in service, it was airplanes
that had been scrapped...

Although it really would be nice to have some more
data..
2

brett snyder

03/03/09 | Report as spam

RE: Aircraft Demand Continues to Drop

@There are still going to be some planes parked now that can come back. It wouldn't surprise me to see some of United's old 737s end up in Africa or Latin America, possibly replacing the 737-200s those guys are using. And there are even newer models being parked as well that will probably find their way back. But I agree - if they've been parked for more than 2 years, they probably aren't going to come back unless Allegiant gets interested!