GE Aviation ‘can’t sit back and wait’ for full recovery: GE chief

General Electric is neither expecting nor planning for a significant spike in demand for commercial air travel that would jolt aviation back to pre-pandemic levels and suddenly improve the fortunes of its aircraft engine division, and instead intends to manufacture as much of its own luck as it can, GE’s CE Larry Culp asserts. Global aviation’s recovery is the number one priority for US-based GE, which also has healthcare and renewable energy divisions in its portfolio. “That’s our biggest, best business in so many ways,” Culp said on 14 September. “You saw that in [our] 2019 profile from a profit [and] a cash perspective. Covid really hit that business hard.” While Culp has been “encouraged” by commercial aviation’s sequential growth this year, the damage wrought recently by the delta variant of Covid-19 has cast doubt any assumptions one can make about the timing of a full recovery. “We’ve watched departures intently in [aviation],” he says. “As of this morning, global departures are off 2019 levels [by] 27%. We see China down 13%, the US down 10%, Europe down 35%.” The number of global flights on 13 September was down 34% versus the same day in 2019, Cirium data shows. Culp insists that GE Aviation is “well positioned” for aviation’s recovery, which he believes is “inevitable”.<br/>