Ian Douglas

But there is fuel still coming from other sources.

The Gulf certainly produces a significant amount of fuel, but it is not 100% of the global fuel supply.

So there is fuel.

Part of the problem, of course, is if you fly out with an aircraft that has a full tank of fuel, it burns that on the way.

It needs to be able to fuel up at the destination point to come back.

But the Europeans have at least six weeks, but probably more.

And there is fuel coming out of the US and other sources.

I'd say at the moment there is a reasonably good chance that long-haul flights will operate pretty much as planned and particularly in Europe that most of the cancellations appear to be on short-haul flights and most of the damage in the industry appears to be low-cost carriers and short-haul operations as well.

Ryanair had already cut back some flying.

EasyJet is now cutting back as well, looking at quite serious profit impacts from the increasing fuel prices.

If we went to the US, Spirit Airlines, another low-cost carrier, on the edge of bankruptcy.

So I think it's the low-cost, short-haul flying that's actually most at risk.

Yeah, the big ones in the Gulf will ride it out with their government parents and the large carriers like Qantas will certainly ride it out as well.

Yeah, there are some carriers, particularly in Vietnam, for example, they've found themselves very short of fuel.

The carriers in that market are struggling consequently.

Other places seem to be less so.

But yeah, it's going to be a difficult period.

And it looks a little bit like the problems of COVID, that it hit pretty hard and it will take quite a while to recover and get back to normal afterwards.

I think we need to get used to higher fares for a while to come because even if everything stopped tomorrow, that the war stopped, that everybody started moving fuel around again, it's definitely going to take time to get stocks back into refineries and delivered to airports again.

Even in the best case where the war stops almost immediately, we are probably months before the whole aviation sector has settled down, that the fuel supplies are back to normal, that the traffic is back to normal and aircraft are operating back at the sort of fares we saw before the war.