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Aviation History
1956
1956 - 1669.PDF
831 FLIGHT,23 November 1956 THE HUNGRY AIRLINES An Examination of Traffic and Transports in 1962 PART 1: THE WORLD MARKET A "FLIGHT" ANALYSIS BY J. M. RAMSDEN AND A. T. PUGH IT would be easy to devote a whole issue of Flight to a summaryof the countless words spoken and written in 1956 on thesubject of the airline industry's prodigious buying spree. "The airlines will be losing their shirts," predicted the Americanbusiness magazine Fortune. "This gloomy prediction is mis- taken," rejoined C. R. Smith, president of American Airlines.And again: "I want a short article about the possibility of the Atlantic getting choked with seats if everybody buys these damnbig jets," ordered Sir William Hildred, director-general of the International Transport Association. "No need for panic . . .there will still be an important margin between supply and demand," replied M. Gilbert Perier, of I.A.T.A.'s executivecommittee. The International Civil Aviation Organization, curator of allthe world's traffic figures, and thus qualified to comment, were non- committal. In their annual report, they simply said: "Whetherthe traffic . . . will expand rapidly enough to keep pace with the re-equipment programme is, of course, a matter of conjecture."Note the words "of course." They seem discreetly to imply that anyone who attempts to calculate the balance between futuretraffic and future capacity will probably come up with results that are wide of the mark.This has in fact been proved time and time again. One has only to glance at past forecasts to see just how inaccurate themost responsible and painstaking researches have been. To take the U.S. domestic market as an example, Curtiss-Wright provedto be nearly 1,000 million passenger-miles, or 12 per cent, short in their 1944 estimate of traffic in 1950. Similarly, the Port of NewYork Authority, estimating in 1950 the 1955 passenger-miles, were 45 per cent too conservative. The same study forecast aU.S. passenger-mileage figure for 1980 that had already been exceeded in the first half of 1956. The lesson of these and otherpast estimates is clear: the growth in traffic has almost invariably been underrated.Nevertheless, the traffic-prophets are irrepressible, and will ever be so. Every airline has them, and upon their joint estimatesdepends the prosperity of the world's aircraft manufacturers. No one knows what their combined estimate ever is; most airlines,for obvious business reasons, keep their researches under lock and key. But to challenge the accuracy of their traffic calcula-tions is the indisputable fact that, on the strength of them, the airlines have ordered £750 million's worth of new equipment inthe last twelve months. This kind of buying is without precedent in air-transport history. Will the airlines lose their shirts as aresult, or is there in fact no need for panic? To answer this question one can turn to the curve of trafficgrowth since the war, extrapolate it to the sixties, work out the total transport capacity available in that period, and measureone against the other. Obviously this is not so simple as it sounds- if it were, there would not be such widely varying opinions about the future. But—respectfully aware of the pit-falls—we now venture upon this fascinating ground. The conclusions to which we come provide a broad measure ofthe prospects for the airlines. What of the prospects for the world's dozen major transport manufacturers? Is the market bigenough for them all to share profitably? Or will some fall by the wayside? In particular, since the medium-haul market isof such special concern to the British industry, is there enough room for the Comet, Britannia and Vanguard, as well as allthe foreign contenders—the Electra, Convair 880, Caravelle, Boeing 727 and DC-9? It is with this provocative question thatthe sequel to the present analysis will be concerned. We should have liked to answer, also, an even more tantalizingquestion: How will the medium-haul market in 1962 (or there- abouts) be shared between jet and turboprop? Obviously thetwo conflicting ideologies will co-exist—but what will be the balance of power? It is upon this question that so many medium-haul carriers are now searching their hearts and their route- studies. Most of the long-haulers have chosen to worship atthe shrine of the jet, but in the medium-haul field we have the curious impasse in which few orders are being placed (14 air-craft in the last five months) while the betwixt-and-between airlines ponder which way to swing. The issue is simple to state,but seemingly impossible to resolve except by "hunch" methods. Shall we, the airlines ask themselves, order turboprops for their 40,000 30,000 , 22000 ZOOOO Plotted to a logarith- mic vertical scale, this curve shows (full line) the growth of scheduled interna- tional and domestic air traffic (passen- gers, freight and mail) carried since 1945, and (broken line) an extrapola- tion to 1962 at the same average annual rate of increase since the year 1948. Q • IOJOOO 5,ooo 2000 7 TOTAL WORLD SCHEDULED TRAFFIC 1945^-47 -49 -50 •" -52,"53 .-55 -56'57-56"-"-« •f;
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