Miami - As fuel prices drop and more planes fly filled to capacity, North America is leading the airline industry in profits while much of the world still struggles, officials said on Monday.
Airlines are projected to make $29.3 billion in collective profit on revenues of $727 billion in 2015, said Tony Tyler, director general of the International Air Transport Association (IATA), at the group's annual meeting in Miami Beach, Florida.
Earlier profit projections had estimated a year-end profit of $25 billion for the industry as a whole.
“For the first time in IATA's records, the industry as a whole is earning its cost of capital,” he said.
He added that airlines are making on average about $8.27 per passenger describing this as “a hard-earned four percent net profit margin”.
A fall in the price of oil has helped boost fortunes in the airline industry, but the rising value of the US dollar has cancelled out much of those gains for some carriers.
“The strongest driver of improved profitability is efficiency,” Tyler told reporters.
“This year we expect airlines to fill 80.2 percent of their seats, a record high.”
Furthermore, industry performance is far from uniform, with North American and Middle East airlines performing the best, he added.
About half the industry's profits - $15.7 billion - come from North American airlines.
Meanwhile, European, Asia-Pacific, African and Latin American carriers are performing below average, he said.
Many of the challenges airlines face involve disputes with governments, and the lack of cost-efficient infrastructure to meet demand.
“A look around the world shows many deficiencies,” Tyler said.
Europe faces a “quadruple whammy of faltering economies, high taxes, onerous regulation, and failing efforts toward a Single European Sky”.
Europe is also expected to see a 12 percent shortfall in airport capacity by 2035.
The Asian market is mixed, with some carriers performing well but those involved with cargo “in the doldrums”, Tyler said.
The Middle East is reporting the fastest growth, but military conflicts, high infrastructure costs and crowded skies are the region's main challenges.
Latin America is being held back by major economic woes, and the key market of Venezuela has yet to resolve an impasse with international carriers that has held up $3.7 billion in payments since October.
Meanwhile, Africa struggles with poor regulatory oversight and safety concerns.
Despite the rosy outlook for North American airlines, American Airlines stock fell 4.5 percent, Delta Air Lines dropped five percent and United Continental lost 4.4 percent.
An analyst at Raymond James added to the gloom, downgrading the three major carriers based on expectations of a “muted” recovery in ticket prices in the coming months.
Despite a series of high-profile crashes in the past year or so, Tyler insisted that “flying has never been safer”, with just one jet lost for every 4.4 million flights.
He described the disappearance of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 in March 2014, the shooting down of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 over war-torn Ukraine in July last year and the deliberate crash by a co-pilot of a Germanwings flight into the French Alps in March as “extraordinary events”.
“Every loss is a tragedy,” Tyler told the opening session of the meeting, which drew more than 1 000 executives from around the world.
“The greatest tribute we can pay to them is to make flying ever safer. That is precisely what we are doing.”
He said improved tracking standards are being developed to report on an airline's whereabouts every 15 minutes, and the technology should be widespread within the next three years.
He described the loss of Flight MH17 - which killed 298 people when it was shot down over Ukraine last year - as “an outrage”, adding that civilian aircraft “must never be targets for weapons of war”.
The loss of Germanwings Flight 9525, which killed all 150 people on board in an apparently suicidal act by a mentally ill co-pilot, was a “deliberate and horrible act by one of our own”.
AFP