The scarcity of new developments announced at this year's Farnborough air show stood in stark contrast to the overall feeling of relief that pervaded the attitude of show exhibitors, relief that the cycle finally has turned the corner and business is in the first stages of recovery. Forecasts started to trend upward and building rates are following slowly.

What a difference two years make. When ATW last reviewed the market potential for passenger-to-freighter conversion programs (9/02, p. 48), airfreight was just beginning to claw back from its most severe contraction since the early 1970s. The winding down of high-priority Y2K-related technology shipments, followed by the bursting of the dot.com and telecom bubbles and then 9/11, resulted in world airfreight traffic (FTKs) falling 6.6% in 2001, according to Arlington, Va.-based MergeGlobal.

In 1964, the US airlines were looking forward to a record year, especially for travel to Europe. With 88.52 million passenger enplanements, up from 77.4 million the previous year, they were not disappointed. They might have been, though, had their vision stretched to the end of the century: Their numbers were a drop in the bucket compared with the 666.15 million enplanements of 2000.

The transformation of commuter/regional airlines over the last 40 years has been nothing short of dramatic. Deregulation, cabin-class airliners, codesharing and top-shelf management have helped change commuter carriers from marginal players with shaky finances into billion-dollar Regionals that have become part of the industry's core.

It was a January luncheon in New York City, a rather small, intimate affair, that gave birth to the Air Transport World Industry Awards program. During that luncheon, ATW founder, publisher and editor Joe Murphy handed out 10 awards to airline executives from around the world. The Airline of the Year for 1974 was United Airlines.