Clouds lift as confidence returns to battered airline industry

It has been a stream of bad news for Heathrow boss John Holland-Kaye over the past 18 months. The airport has lost nearly GBP3b since the pandemic began and terminals have been mothballed, while Holland-Kaye has been engaged in frantic government lobbying to reopen UK borders. But in the past few weeks, the black clouds hanging over aviation seem to be lifting to reveal at least chinks of blue sky, prompting Holland-Kaye to call a meeting of airlines and ground handlers with a new message: Make sure you are ready for flying to rebound in the coming months. “I think we have come out of the phase where we just batten down the hatches,” he said. This cautious optimism is slowly spreading across large parts of the ravaged airline industry, which has suffered its worst-ever crisis as one of the hardest-hit sectors in the pandemic, with executives betting vaccines and loosening travel restrictions have cleared the path to recovery. Confidence is growing fastest in the US with carriers starting to report profits thanks to a buoyant domestic market, while in Europe the new upbeat mood has prompted the region’s airlines such as easyJet and Ryanair to plan a ramp-up in their flying schedules during the late summer. “We are in the midst of an unprecedented recovery,” Doug Parker, CE of American Airlines, told analysts on the latest quarterly earnings call. Willie Walsh, former head of British Airways owner International Airlines Group who runs global airline trade body IATA, said: “The recovery has definitely started in the second half, there are signs of things improving, restrictions being relaxed or removed, and we have to take positives from that.” It is a sharp change in fortunes for an industry that has been battered by the pandemic with global airlines losing a combined $125b in 2020 and forecast by IATA to lose another $48b this year.<br/>