Four aviation CEOs described a resilient recovery in the face of ongoing geopolitical disruptions and elevated fuel costs at the IATA Congress 2026 in Rio de Janeiro.
Con Korfiatis of Oman Air shared that recovery of the phase he thinks we are still in the phase but he comes back to the word of resilience Richard and that the industry is incredibly resilient but also the customers have been incredibly resilient as well so outside of lots of groundings for a period of time and gradually the skies have opened and gradually and actually more than gradually quite rapidly actually the capacity has been coming back so that shows there is resilience on the airlines part and the confidence to bring that capacity back but also on the customers to support the airlines. He added that the capacity return and the customer resilience has maintained through that it does not fluctuate week to week it has been steady and it has been increasing.
Adrian Neuhauser of Avianca Abra Group shared that it is a sea change in our business and yet to Cols point to your point to what was said by Will it is resilient right we are if someone had set this scenario up last year and said hey we are going to have a war and fuel is going to be at four dollars and how much of a crisis is it going to be versus where we are look we are aggressively passing pricing through and customers are responding and the booking curve is shorter but customers are showing up they are buying and we are seeing the planes fill up with higher yields and that yields are higher than any of us thought would be tolerable and we are not seeing softness in demand so certainly a new world and yet again resilient.
Güliz Öztürk of Pegasus Airlines shared that yes we do and that she is in the business for more than thirty years now and she cannot see any fourth year which goes well after no consecutive four years are going in positive in the aviation business that is awesome this is not fearful but we are still here so that is what aviation is actually and that this is very open to crisis but we all navigated through so many challenges like Gulf War crisis COVID and everything and that the airlines the management teams who have actually learned and strengthened their initiatives in terms of this are probably navigating more in a more healthier way. She shared further that what we are doing maybe this is the worst situation for two thousand and twenty six but while going into each year we are having our scenarios in hands different business plans not only one budget anymore after COVID we have always B plans in our hands so that if anything comes up or if any like you see the signals coming in what kind of B plans you may put into force it is not easy because fuel price is not under our control you can have some initiatives like hedging or so but that is it you have to manage it with other plans or at the like with capacity management.
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