Airlines Are Buying Jets To Fly Until 2060 — But New Technology Will Steal Their Best Customers And Make Those Bets Money-Losers

A confident – and wrong – prediction is making the rounds: “Suborbital space launch will eliminate all intercontinental flights in the next ten years.” A rocket climbs above most of the atmosphere, crosses the globe in a high arc without entering orbit, and lands thousands of miles away. Trips that take 15 hours by air could take about an hour. Satellite operators and defense customers are already paying to develop reusable rockets. Point-to-point passenger service could build on vehicles, engines and launch infrastructure created for those much markets. Today, Blue Origin’s New Shepard launches six people from West Texas, crosses the conventional boundary of space and lands near where it started. It’s carried 98 paying passengers. Virgin Galactic has an airplane-like approach, even landing on a runway, with commercial service expected to come in February. SpaceX says it Starship “could one day” enable global travel in under an hour. But where things stand now isn’t the point – it’s where they’re going that matters. I know these people. DC people need to understand a few things: Suborbital space launch will eliminate all intercontinental flights in the next ten years. There will be no more terrestrial wireless in ten years either. Basically all compute will be in space within ten years.… https://t.co/wQoH3YYvqO — Payton Alexander (@AlexanderPayton) August 23, 2026 There is no passenger spacecraft operating between two cities, no pair of spaceports capable of handling an airline schedule, and no demonstrated path to regulatory approval for consumer travel at scale. The Federal Aviation Administration forecasts a high end of 507 authorized commercial space operations in 2036, ten years from now, and that includes launches and reentries of all kinds, not just passengers flying New York to London and Los Angeles to Sydney. The current U.S. regulatory framework doesn’t certify a commercial spacecraft as safe for its occupants. It allows willing participants to accept disclosed risks. Clearly the regulatory framework will change. Insurers, corporate travel departments and foreign governments will demand it even if Congress doesn’t. But the prediction is interesting precisely because it gets the important question wrong – new technology doesn’t have to eliminate conventional international flying to cause creative disruption of the airline industry. It only has to steal some of the high yield passengers who make those flights profitable. And people aren’t thinking enough about what’s coming, and how that affects airlines and airframe manufacturers also. The Real Threat Is Pulling Away High Yield Passengers A few dozen first class and business class passengers can make the difference between a route operating profitably or at a loss. This is going to matter most for ultra-long haul flights which significant fuel expense and greater aircraft time, augmented crews, and often payload restrictions so they’re more reliant on passengers than cargo. Most shorter international trips will never justify a rocket, since you’ve got travel time to and from the nearest spaceport. And it’s going to be expensive. Business class customers willing to pay a large premium to save time or avoid a connection on ultra-long haul travel are precisely the ones who are most likely to be pulled away by the massive time savings of initially very expensive suborbital flight. The irony is that the largest U.S. airlines are leaning harder than ever into premium revenue just as new transportation technologies are most likely to target premium customers. This doesn’t mean airlines stop flying routes, it might mean fewer frequencies, smaller aircraft and less investment in product. Aircraft values drop, too, with less demand. Right now, technological revolutions are only being felt in the most modest ways at U.S. airlines. United reduced management headcount 4% and planned another 4% reduction as artificial intelligence made headquarters work more efficient. Delta hired Fetcherr to automate and improve pricing decisions. Airlines are using artificial intelligence for crew planning, customer service chatbots and disruption management as well. But most of this uses new technology to run the existing airline model more efficiently. It doesn’t even consider the possibility that technology changes the whole business. The Airlines Most At Risk Qantas will begin Sydney – London Project Sunrise service in October 2027 with a specially modified Airbus A350-1000. The aircraft has only 238 seats. More than 40% of the aircraft is premium. Nonstop service saves up to four hours, and it expects customers to pay for that. But a passenger buying a first class suite on a 20-hour flight is exactly the one that might consider cutting their journey time down by 80% at a price. The Singapore Airlines Airbus A350-900ULR has 67 business class seats and 94 premium economy seats and no regular economy cabin. The world’s longest scheduled flights are built almost entirely around passengers who might pay to make the trip much shorter. Emirates and Qatar Airways face a somewhat different version of the risk. Their hubs aggregate traffic from hundreds of city pairs, including enormous amounts of price-sensitive leisure traffic that no high speed startup will replace. But their best customers are paying for premium cabins on a one-stop journey between Europe or North America and Asia or Australia. A direct high-speed alternative would bypass Dubai or Doha entirely. Cargo helps preserve some flights, though. Ships still carry roughly 80% of international merchandise by volume even though airplanes have existed for more than a century. Air freight carries less than 1% by weight but about one-third by value. Cheaper matters. Boeing And Airbus Face Real Problems. Too Boeing’s current market forecast calls for 7,715 new passenger widebodies through 2045. Airbus projects 8,140 widebody deliveries. Both companies see their markets growing, and not really facing competition from new modes of travel. Boeing is more exposed if the premium long haul market shrinks. Its order book is more heavily weighted toward widebodies, and the 777X in particular depends on large long haul networks and premium-heavy Gulf carriers. Airbus has more protection from its A320-family backlog. But its A350-1000 program is also at some risk if the biggest premium-heavy aircraft become harder to fill profitably. Just like airlines need to think about risks to their model over the long-term, aircraft manufacturers do as well. It’s not that the market dries up for their planes, but they won’t be able to charge as much if the residual value is expected to fall. They’re selling delivery slots now for planes that are expected to be relevant and operating in the 2050s and beyond. As technology accelerates and becomes expected to change the mix of demand for travel on these aircraft, the value could drop now even based on what air travel looks like 30 years from now. So in some sense, the future for purchase and pricing decisions is already here. Topics on this page