Aircraft Demand Continues to Drop

Bryan Corliss has been doing an excellent job of covering the decline in demand for aircraft here at BNET (Airbus, Boeing), but I thought I'd dip my toe into the discussion today with the latest news on the surge of aircraft heading to the desert.

According to Ascend, there are about 2,300 aircraft parked because they aren't needed right now. If you're looking for some context on that number, last year only 1,167 were parked. To put it another way, about 11 percent of the world's fleet is parked now, nearing the 13 percent that was parked after September 11. It's not looking any better either. The numbers of parked aircraft will continue to grow.

So if you've ever had a good airline idea, this is a great time to be able to find cheap planes to operate it. If it wasn't for that whole economy meltdown thing . . . .