Onwards and Upwards in 2025

Here we are!

2025 is here! So, how is the Aviation industry looking? What were the highlights, major events and big challenges of 2024, and what does the future, now we are in it, look like?

What happened in 2024?₁

2024 started with a tragedy at Tokyo’s Haneda airport when a Japan Airlines A350 collided with a Japan Coast Guard aircraft during a runway incursion. This was followed by another incident for Boeing when an Alaskan 737 Max had a window blow out in flight.

Just when we thought every random threat had surely been engineered out, a LATAM 787 suffered an upset in cruise which was attributed to the inadvertent activation of the seat switch, sending the Captain forwards against the control column.

Then there was some good news in March, or at least vaguely exciting news from the USA where Boom conducted their first flight of their supersonic demonstrator prototype (more on supersonic flight later because 2025 could be the year for it).

April saw major US airlines Southwest and American reporting hefty losses, suggesting a big downturn in the US industry. May reminded us of how serious turbulence is when a Singapore Boeing 777 experienced severe turbulence that led to an emergency landing at Bangkok.

June saw the first first hurricane of the season to be named in twenty years as Alverto raged towards Mexico. Then Hurricane Beryl because the earliest Category 5 hurricane on record.

We would all probably like to forget what happened in July… namely the Crowdstrike Incident which led to 5078 flight cancellations (that’s just under 5% of worldwide operations on that day).

August saw the tragedy of the Voepass Linhas Aéreas ATR 72 crash in São Paulo, a stark reminder of how severe icing can be. September involved the strike of more than 33,000 Boeing employees, leading to the halting of 737, 777 and 767 aircraft.

Then came October, and I’m going to pick a random one here – a bomb dropped by US Forces during WWII exploded under a taxiway at Miyazaki Airport in Japan.

November was a month of fairly positive things – airshows in Bahrain, and China, Pakistan’s civil aviation authority finally seeing a 4 year ban by EASA lifted, and Nuuk airport re-opening with a nicely extended runway (this is actually pretty big in that it’s Greenland’s first international airport).

And finally, December. There was a good note with Turkish Airlines being awarded a Guinness World Record for most countries flown to by an airline, but sadly the year ended with two major tragedies – the shot down of an Azerbaijan Airlines Embraer 190, and the overrun of a Jeju Air Boeing 737 in Muan.

Gimme some for stats for the year₁₀

Just a few about 2024 like that Shangai Pudong was the fastest growing airport in 2024, increasing to 47,588,33 passengers from 37,677,145 in 2023. Or that the busiest domestic route in the world was CJU/Jeju – GMP/Kimpo with 199 flights per day. That seems a lot. Or that the busiest day of the year was August 2nd which saw 19,278,320 seats filled!…

How did safety look in 2024?

We don’t have a safety review for 2024 yet, but EASA’s 2024 report₄ told us we saw 0 fatal accidents in 2023, 18 non-fatal and 33 serious ones in the CAT category. The majority of events were attributed to system malfunctions and technical issues, followed by MAC (that’s airprox, ACAS, loss of separation type things) and then engine problems.

Sadly, 2024 has seen fatal accidents, as well as other serious safety threats including more of what is possibly the largest to commercial aviation – conflict zones.

Let’s look at those in brief

Sadly, conflict continues to rage worldwide and this leads to safety concerns for commercial traffic in many of the world’s airspaces. One of the biggest impacting the industry remains the Russian – Ukraine conflict both because of the closure of such a large region of airspace, but also the hugely increased threat levels which recently saw an Azerbaijani airline flight shot down.

The Israel – Hamas conflict continues to cause concern in the Middle East because of both the spillover effect leading to major threats like GPS interference, and because of the number of stakeholders now involved. Iraq, Iran, Jordan, Syria, Kuwait and Lebanon all closed their airspace in April as a result of the conflict.

The continued and widespread impact of conflicts leads to airspace safety issues, longer routes (and with that, fuel burn and environmental impact), lack of diversion options and threats like GPS interference, airspace congestion, conflict with military aircraft amongst other things.

One slightly hopefully story is that of Syria. They have not seen international flights really since the onset of the civil war in 2011, and Damascus airport suffered major damage in 2022 following an Israeli missile attack (and again in 2023). But things are changing there, and the airport opened on December 18th for a test flight, with domestic flights expected to restart early 2025… and maybe if the country stabilises, eventually international flights might start utilising the airspace once again.

So what’s (hopefully) improving in 2025?

Growth

Well, the year started off with Iceland becoming the 42nd State to join Eurocontrol. This means coordinated traffic flows, collaborative airspace management (particularly if more volcanoes erupt) and of course their new international airport getting lots of use!

Big growth is on the cards with a lot of new aircraft heading out. IATA reported that the average age of the global fleet sits at 14.8 years. That’s the oldest on record and so is likely to lead to some 1,802 predicted deliveries of new aircraft. That’s just shy of the most ever (1,813 in 2018). Oh and just to mention this too – also according to IATA, the industry might just hit the $1 trillion revenue milestone in 2025!₃.

Design

When it comes to big paradigm shifting designs, those days sadly appear to be over, and the focus seems to be mostly on smaller improvements instead. Things like biofuel, slightly better engines, more electric stuff and tweaks to wing design to improve efficiency and turbulence handling.

But that doesn’t mean nothing exciting could be on its way. NASA’s new X-59 supersonic demonstrator jet engine (the F414-GE-100) has been test running since October, which means the first flight is now pitched for 2025. And of course Boom are still working on their supersonic aircraft project and reckon the first of their ‘Overture’ aircraft will roll off the line in 2025 (although passengers won’t get a look in until 2029).

Then there is Airbus continue to develop their biomimcry projects which will hopefully see aircraft flying ‘like geese’ over the North Atlantic (yay) and A350 which can divert and land themselves (less of a yay, because the threat of single pilot ops remains and 2025 is going to a year of battling against evolving more!) The Wake Energy Retrivel project is due to see actual flights start to commence in the second half of 2025, initially just with 350s but hopefully others to be involved not too long after.

And there are some ‘smaller’ (more localised things) happening all over the place. Like Heathrow Airports ‘pairwise’ separation for arrivals that kicked off in December 2024. This uses the specific characteristic of each type instead of just using the 6 groups of old. For departures, this means aircraft with short take-off rolls and high climb gradients can be paired closer to big, fat things making runway usage a lot more efficient. While on approach, the distance between certain types can be reduced. Also making it more efficient without compromising safety₇

The NAT HLA (because it’s big and I fly over it a lot)

2024 saw the removal of (most) of the NAT HLA requirement for a clearance (not that that really changed all that much in terms of the procedures for pilots) and (hopefully because they keep delaying it) 2025 will finally see Shanwick join the ‘no OCL’ party too.

Now, we should also talk about Bulletin 2017-002 (revision 8)₅ which came out in June 2024, offering advice on how to avoid the main errors. We’re talking GNEs (lateral deviation of 10nm or more), LHDs (vertical devotions of 300 feet or more) and erosion of longitudinal separation (getting too close to the aircraft in front). One of the reasons for this is because 2023 saw 9 of their safety indicators reduce. In other words, things were getting messed up more in 2023 (26% more than 2022 in case you’re wondering)!₆

So hopefully 2025 sees an improvement there.

Let’s talk traffic numbers

Because the real BIG things for commercial aviation in 2025 is how much everyone hopes it will grow by (well, everyone expect environmental folk that like glueing themselves to runways!)

So, first up, despite being years ago now, traffic across Europe still hasn’t quite reached pre-Covid (2019) levels… but, good news, it is forecast to hit 99% in 2025, with Eurocontrol₂ expecting 10.9 million flights (and a nice continuous 2% minimum growth after that).

Long haul routes are the ones really growing here. Back in 2015 they made up just 20% of the market, by 2023 this was 30%. Worldwide though is looking better – IATA reckon passenger numbers will hit the 5.2 billion mark₃ which is… drum roll…. The most ever.

But this is still facing a couple of big obstacles, namely MRO issues and production delays. The production delays are leading to slow deliveries of aircraft (at a time when they are really needed because of the MRO issues). So growth is expected to be around 3-4%, which is steady but not great.

China is the one to watch, with huge growth forecast. They hope (and are well on their way) to becoming the biggest domestic in the world over the next decade, and they are building hundreds of airports and runways at a right old rate. They are also looking to become a manufacturer to rival Boeing and Airbus.

How does everything compare to what we thought would happen?

The ICAO Outlook

ICAO published their ‘Outlook for Air Transport to the Year 2025’ back in 2007. Cool stuff₈. So, what did it say?

Well, first of all there is a whole long section on historical trends and Rebecca got bored and fast-forwarded through to their forecast bit. This reckoned that airlines in the middle East and Asia Pacific would grow the most in terms of passengers. They probably did (I tried to check and got bored).

They also reckoned major international route groups would grow by between 3 to 6%, and that international scheduled passenger traffic would grow at around 5.3% a year, and domestic at 3.4% on average. These weren’t far out but of course Covid hit (they couldn’t forecast that one) and threw it all out of whack. 2024 increased overall by about 10% on 2023 which was a big increase and helped₉

The report also predicted 4.5 billion passengers would be flying by 2025, with around 1.95 billion of those internationally, and the other 2.55 billion domestically. They actually weren’t far off. 4.4 billion flew by the end of 2023 and that consisted of 1.8 billion international and 2.6 billion domestic passengers₁₁

What did other folk say?

In 2000, the FAA came out and said that they reckoned 2025 would see 1.2 billion domestic passengers flying. They were off by a few million (approximately 819 million flew domestically in 2024).

In the meantime, the European Commission published their ‘Vision 2025’ in 2001 which reckoned the Single European Sky would be fully implemented by 2025. It is yet to be completed (but is well on its way). And Boeing predicted over 25,000 new commercial aircraft would be needed by 2025 in their 2004 outlook. They weren’t far off.

What about earlier predictions?

It’s always fun to look further back and chortle at the silliness of what people thought the future would look like.

Back in 1966, a fellow called Peter Hearne made some predictions. One of those was that by 2020 work on projects to ‘demonstrate the ability of humans to control computers by thought process’ would already have been successful. This was so that humans could fly airplanes by mind control… He also thought we would have anti-gravity machines by 2020.

We’re falling behind people! Or are we?

No, we are. Although… in 2015 a project called BRAINFLIGHT did have some level of success wiring people up and having them control drones. I don’t know if they are still working on it₁₂

This was in a simulator and they did actually fly accurately enough to pass a PPL. If they think I’m flying in one of those though…

Back in 1951, Poplar Mechanics predicted that by 2020 we would all have personal helicopters. Not quite, but EVTOL is getting there. Abu Dhabi are set to have their first (actually the world’s first) air taxi service take-off in 2025.

Then there are the predictions about flights to Pluto, regular moon orbit weekend getaways, nuclear powered aircraft and teleportation which were, well… not quite right.

What do I hope 2025 will see?

For me, I would like to see increases in safety, particularly with runway incursions (who can forget the 4 aircraft incursion at JFK in April!), runway excursions (we should’t be seeing so many, we have performance checks and TEM for a reason) and better comms between ATC and pilots (I always harp on about this, but I think more understanding between the two roles on the challenges/goals of each is critical).