This week at the SAE 2023, Dr. Mohammed Yeahiya provides an insight into the current industry trends and challenges.
This article will cover the details surrounding the insights on the aviation industry provided by Dr. Mohammed Yeahiya, Assistant Professor at the Prince Sultan University during the SAE 2023.
SAE 2023 – Prince Sultan University Insights
To kick things off during SAE 2023, Prince Sultan University’s Assistant Professor, Department of Management, Dr. Mohammed Yeahiya, did a speech during session two of the Global Aviation Issues conference.
As per the above infographic, Dr. Yeahiya began speaking about current airline profitability which sees a current average of $5.6 per passenger profit, which is still considerably lower than the highest seen at $9 per passenger back in 2017.
Airlines are still quite heavily in debt too meaning that airlines and the industry still has a long way to go before profitability really increases, as well as getting rid of get high debt counts.
Following on, Dr. Yeahiya commented that aircraft shortages are not helping matters either with backlogs across all manufacturers and types, with the prime backlog being narrowbody aircraft at 80%.
The current total aircraft backlog sits around 14,000 so there is still quite a long way to go before the backlog has mostly been cleared, and as airlines are now placing more aircraft orders, this will become increasingly more difficult for manufacturers to control.
Moving onto being net zero emissions by 2030 and the utilisation of SAF (Sustainable Aviation Fuels), at the moment SAF is the only way forward, however, most airlines are wanting to adopt SAF but with limited availability and not very many large scale productions of SAF, this is still a long way off from where it needs to be for the industry.
AI and cybersecurity is another large arm to the aviation industry, with autonomous pilot aircraft at some stage in the future, likely decades from now given current regulations and capacity, as well as the utilisations of AI for helping with demand forecasts, fleet management and scheduling.
From a cybersecurity perspective, passenger data protection is key, as well as airline and airport systems being able to cope with cyber threats, meaning the integrity of this data needs to be paramount for any aviation business.
Finally, looking onwards to the Kingdom’s growth, it is expected that when compared to the other large Middle Eastern carriers, KSA airlines are growing at three times the pace on a “Giga Level” as opposed to a “Mega Level”.
This also goes the same for KSA airlines fleet growth, to coincide with the Kingdom’s Vision 2030 of achieving 330 million visitors to the Kingdom by that time.
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