I received an interesting invitation through the mail this week asking if I would be interested in taking a junket to New York to meet with various airline industry and city officials next month on the anniversary of the terrorist attacks last September.
The trip's theme would be to see how resilient the New York region, the United States in general, and the airline industry, has been in recovering against adversity. Happy days, in other words.
The junket piqued my interest since, considering the state of the global airline industry, talk of recovery would seem to be quite a stretch. For most of the industry, and the world economy, uncertainty still pervades. The reality, unfortunately, has been quite the opposite over the past 12 months.
Nearly a year on from the attacks, most of the world's major airlines remain mired in perhaps the industry's most wicked recession ever.
Far from the second-half recovery that the international airline industry had hoped for earlier in the year, sentiment has declined to the point where the industry's aggregated loss this year is expected to be significantly worse than the US$6 billion forecast by the International Air Transport Association (Iata).
One interesting statistic to keep in mind is that losses on international routes have wiped out almost as much profit as airlines had made in the previous four to five years combined.
