Rise of ‘thin’ routes and aging fleets drive Airbus’ long

Free for nonsubscribers By Charles Alcock July 10, 2026, © Leeham News: A combination of airlines’ desire to expand their networks with longer, thinner routes connecting smaller cities and a growing need to replace aging aircraft were key factors behind rising demand identified in the latest Global Market Forecast (GMF) released by Airbus on July 8. Between 2026 and 2045, the European airframer is now predicting 42,060 new passenger airliner deliveries in response to a projected two-fold increase in revenue passenger kilometers to 21.3 trillion. Notably, this year’s 20-year forecast for global aircraft demand represents a slightly lower estimate than the one provided in Airbus’ forecast last year, which predicted 43,400 new passenger and freighter aircraft deliveries from 2025 to 2044. Presenting this year’s GMF update to reporters in London, Antonio da Costa, Airbus’ vice president for market analysis and forecast, highlighted flight demand foundations such as rising personal wealth in Asia, Africa and Latin America. He pointed to anticipated growth in yearly flights per capita in countries including Nigeria, Egypt, India, South Africa, Brazil, Indonesia, Colombia, China and South Korea. Part of this demand curve comes from people living and working outside their home country to make trips home to visit friends and relatives. This trend, Da Costa explained, is partly responsible for the expansion of direct air services between smaller cities, allowing passengers to avoid connections in mega hubs. In 2025, according to Airbus, 55% of all city pairs were new routes that had not existed 20 years earlier. Da Costa pointed to an additional 532 airports with scheduled airline services that had not been on the global route network in 2005, pointing to such examples as Sucre in Brazil, Daocheng in China, and the Vietnamese resort destination of Thanh Hoa. For Airbus, these GMF data points were part of its sales pitch on the route-launching potential for its newest narrowbody offering, the A220, which could potentially unlock more than 400 new thin routes in North America, Europe and Africa. The manufacturer also maintained that airlines have been eager to exploit significant range increases for the A350 (+1,900 nm), A330 (+3,000 nm), A321 (+2,500 nm), and A220 (+600 nm) families to add longer routes to networks. Beyond these market trends, however, Airbus sees an increasingly urgent need to replace aging aircraft with a higher proportion (47%) of the projected new deliveries through 2045 expected to fill this role. Those deliveries will include 15,580 single-aisle airliners and 4,240 widebodies. According to Airbus’ analysis, as of 2025, just 53% of the global airliner fleet were less than 10 years old, compared with 63% in 2015. The proportion of in-service jets aged between 11 and 20 years increased over the same period from 29% to 35%. Airbus commercial marketing vice president Joost van der Heijden said that the air transport sector has demonstrated strong resilience in the face of overlapping geopolitical challenges including the ongoing conflicts between Russia and Ukraine, and between the U.S. and Israel and Iran. The new GMF anticipates traffic growth of 2.1% this year, despite the unplanned dip in flights suffered by Middle Eastern carriers since February. “The lessons learned from these challenges include airlines working to diversify their sources of fuel, their ability to use different routes to maintain connectivity,” van der Heijden said. “In fact, it has also reinforced the desire to replace older fleets [with more fuel-efficient aircraft].” Boeing is set to release its own market forecast late next week as the aviation industry gears up for the Farnborough air show. Any insights as to which geographical regions are most prevalently demonstrating the “aging fleet tendency” referred to in the article? And is it predominantly among widebodies or narrowbodies? You can look it up here. https://mediaassets.airbus.com/pm_38_916_916323-s5ya7yb4o0.xlsx?fileName=airbus-commercial-aircraft-gmf-2026-2045.xlsx https://www.airbus.com/en/products-services/commercial-aircraft/global-market-forecast https://mediaassets.airbus.com/pm_38_916_916404-8waq6egqgj.pdf?fileName=en-presentation-gmf-2026-2045.pdf Sorry this is the 39 page 20 year Global Market Forecast from Airbus https://www.airbus.com/en/products-services/commercial-aircraft/global-market-forecast I’m interested in the environmental impact of “long thin point to point” vs “long thick point to hub followed by a short thin hub to destination”. Does one have less carbon impact than the other? Any data out there on this topic? Well, long flights are generally more fuel-inefficient than short ones, because the fuel for the final phase of the flight has to be carried as dead weight during the entire earlier phase of the flight. This effect takes on monsterly proportions for ultra-long flights, such as the 19-20 hour ULR marathons being offeren by Singapore and Qantas. Less monsterly for XLR narrowbody flights, but the same principle. Sooner or later, the environmental movement will sink its teeth into this. Headline climate news like the heatwaves in Europe and the US this year, and the expected super El Niño this fall/winter, certainly won’t help. What also won’t help is the trend of increasing “premium-ization” of aircraft cabins — which results in fewer passengers carried per kg of fuel. As regards those heatwaves: all we need is a grid failure caused by a peak in airco use, and all hell will break loose — everything from dataceners to electric vehicles to aviation will be in the spotlight…with a particular backlash against the former. Airbus appears to be adopting the “long thin route” philosophy that Boeing has held for over 20 years. That moves away from their megahub philosophy that resulted in the A380 program. Despite its technical merit, that was a program that might cause a typical OEM to go under without government subsidies. Let us forget this very old theme of “government subsidies.” All fair analysis have proved that subsidies have been rather high on both sides of the pond! And A380 repaid a significant part of its launch aid financing. A320 and A330/340 repaid launch aid financing many times over… Airbus overestimated the market for A380s, possibly intentionally, and return of the subsidy was spread over that number of deliveries. When they only delivered a few hundred, then too bad for the investor. What happens to A380 style marketing?