Hello and welcome to today's independent travel podcast Wednesday the 24th of July and if you happen to be in the North Hampshire area you will know that it's the Farnborough International Air Show this once every two years festival of aviation fun. I'm not actually there because I've got quite a lot on in terms of all the

chaos that's unfolding in day-to-day travel life, but I know a man who has been and he is our

old friend Paul Charles, chief executive of the PC agency and also former communications director

for Virgin Atlantic. And it would be great to spend a few minutes talking about the temperature of the aviation industry what we can look forward to and what we need to be watching out for so hello Paul first of all how's farmbrough

nice to see you Simon very good farmborough was not raining it dry. It's had a really good turnout. And I'd say the mood was pretty upbeat, actually, for Farnborough this year. Maybe on the back of a new prime minister attending. Things are looking up or so people say.

Well, you don't particularly get a great picture from what we've seen, for instance, at the start of this week.

Let me take you just to Monday when Farnborough started.

You had, in very quick succession, Ryanair saying profits of nearly half for the third quarter,

part of that is due to air traffic control

chaos and then on the same day after easy to cancel hundreds of flights over the weekend,

the boss Johann Lundgren came out and said that air traffic control in Europe isn't fit for

purpose. So you've seen a lot of aviation. How bad are things out there? Well, the problem I think in

the industry is that everybody saw this massive uptake and improvement after COVID. So we came out

of the pandemic, of course, with everybody desperate to get away and coming out of lockdown. Price has

soared. Everybody wanted to be on a flight and go and see somebody or go somewhere.

And that is, that froth that we've had for the last two years is blowing off.

So airlines hired lots more people.

They had more planes available.

They retired their older fleet during COVID.

And things were looking very good during

2023 and suddenly we've gone into 2024 with still high inflation.

Prices continuing to rise generally, not always, but generally.

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