14 resources on the Air Travel Industry

The air travel industry illustrates lots of issues within A-Level Economics, particularly Year 13 micro but also macro and labour too. This means it can make great synoptic revision; indeed, the airplane market was featured in the 2022 AQA Paper 3. A few resources if you want to explore this industry with your students:

• This Storyline Game makes an interesting starter, forcing students to think about what they would expect trends to be

• This chart shows world air passenger numbers alongside major events that shocked the market- it might be nice to blue the events out and ask students a) what they think these events were and b) how they explain the trends in the data

• This infographic from Visual Capitalist shows the fleet composition of different airlines

• The Netflix documentary Downfall: The Case Against Boeing covers topics such as duopoly and regulation, and received good reviews from my students

• This blog post from Tutor 2U looks at the huge operating losses at Heathrow

• This summary report from the International Aviation Transport Association has some nice data and provides students with a good chance to tackle a report like this

• Airlines have been prominent in the use of Dynamic Pricing

• Wendover Productions has some good videos on this including:

  • How Airlines Price Flights demonstrates basic demand, supply and elasticity factors as well as interdependence, price leadership and predatory pricing. It also looks briefly at price discrimination in terms of minimum stay requirements

  • How Covid broke the airline pricing model looks at the long and short term effects of the shocks

  • looks at the Economics of Airline Class, a good example of cross-subsidisation (they also have videos

  • The Economics of Airline Class touches on cross-subsidisation and using flexibility as a tool for price discrimination

  • Big Plane vs Little Plane illustrates networks and economies of scale

  • How Budget Airlines Work demonstrates non-price competition and innovation

  • Economics of Private Jets - your students might find the @celebjets account on twitter interesting as some say it promotes climate accountability

BA on it's own makes an interesting case study, allowing students to look at privatisation, scrimpflation, data breaches and strikes