Willie Walsh has never been shy about naming names. In what was likely his last major speech as IATA director general, delivered at the association’s AGM in Rio de Janeiro in June, he opened not with the usual survey of industry health but with a list of who he thinks is failing it. Manufacturers. Oil companies. Air traffic management authorities. He went after all three in the same address, and he did it with the numbers to back each charge.
I have spent years on the ATM side of this industry, watching airspace performance data tell the same story Walsh told from the podium: fuel burn that should be falling isn’t, delays that should be shrinking aren’t, and modernization plans that keep slipping another few years to the right. Hearing IATA’s outgoing chief say it in public, with figures attached, is still a different thing than watching it in the statistics.
The backlog that will not clear
Walsh’s sharpest numbers were aimed at aircraft and engine manufacturers. The global order backlog now exceeds 18,000 aircraft, and the average age of the world’s commercial fleet has climbed to a record 15.2 years, according to Aviation Week’s report on the AGM. Airlines are short more than 5,000 fuel-efficient replacement aircraft they had counted on receiving, which means missed efficiency gains on top of higher lease rates and rising maintenance bills. Walsh put a figure on the total damage: supply chain failures cost airlines at least $11 billion in 2025 alone.
What made the line land was the contrast he drew next. Manufacturers have kept posting margins well above what airlines see even in good years, delivery failures notwithstanding. “My message to the engine OEMs is simple,” Walsh said. “Stop gouging us and get back to making great engines that work and that last. Allowing these failures to extend into the next decade is totally unacceptable to the customers,” as Aviation Week quoted him. That same report points out that several of the manufacturers he was criticizing were also among the AGM’s top sponsors. IATA airlines got some of that sponsorship money back in the same room where they heard about it being withheld on the delivery side.
Fuel prices did the rest of the damage
None of this would sting as much in a year of cheap fuel. It is not that kind of year. Jet fuel prices are running 70% higher than a year earlier, adding roughly $100 billion to the world’s airlines’ collective fuel bill in 2026, per Aviation Week’s coverage of the AGM. That single line item forced IATA to nearly halve its industry profit forecast for the year, from $41 billion down to $23 billion, a downgrade FlightGlobal covered in detail after speaking with Walsh directly. Net margins are now expected at 2.0%, down from 4.2%, according to the same Aviation Week report.
A meaningful share of that hit lands on Gulf carriers, whose region is now expected to lose $4.3 billion this year rather than post the near $7 billion profit IATA had originally projected, according to FlightGlobal. The remaining drop in the global forecast is almost entirely the fuel bill. Walsh was careful to say the industry is not in crisis, distinguishing the current period from the pandemic or the 2008 financial crash, but he called it “a very tough financial period” for airlines that were already financially weak going into it.
An oil industry that walked away
If manufacturers were the first target, the oil industry was the second, and Walsh’s language here was even blunter. Sustainable aviation fuel was supposed to be the bridge to the industry’s 2050 net zero target, agreed back in 2021. It is not behaving like a bridge. IATA’s own figures, shared at the AGM and reported by Aviation Week, put global SAF production at around 2.4 million tonnes in 2026, which works out to just 0.8% of total commercial aviation fuel use, at a cost to airlines of $4.3 billion.
“The path to meeting 65% of our needs in 2050 is growing more difficult with each year of ineffectively sequenced government policies and oil companies’ manifest lack of interest,” Walsh said, as quoted by Aviation Week. That phrase, “manifest lack of interest,” is doing a lot of work. It is not a complaint about slow technology. It is an accusation that a specific industry with the capital to scale SAF production has chosen not to.
Airspace that governments will not fix
The third target is the one I know from the inside, and it is the one that frustrates me most, because it is the most fixable of the three. Walsh described Europe’s air traffic management system as suffering from “fragmented inefficiency” and the United States system as one that decades of under-investment have left “best described as nostalgic, certainly not modern,” a line captured by Aviation Week. He added that more airspace is becoming entangled in conflict zones, managed safely but through rigid, sub-optimal route systems, and that nationalistic thinking keeps blocking progress on smarter, more flexible airspace design.
His closing shot on this front captured the contradiction better than anything else in the speech: the hypocrisy of governments talking about sustainability and competitiveness while dragging their feet on the ATM reform that would deliver both. Shorter, more efficient routings save fuel directly. That is not a hypothetical benefit modernization might eventually produce. It is the mechanism by which better airspace design turns into lower emissions and lower costs, and it has been sitting on government desks for years while fuel prices did the opposite of what everyone hoped.
Geopolitics is compounding the airspace problem rather than easing it. Walsh told FlightGlobal that airspace restrictions over Russia continue to raise costs for European and Asian carriers, and that the conflict in the Middle East has added a new layer of complexity on top of that. “Geopolitics is definitely having a big impact on the industry, and more than I’ve witnessed in my previous 45 years in the industry,” he said, and he does not expect that to change. “My experience is when we have these geopolitical issues, they never completely disappear. They ease, but don’t disappear, and I think that’s likely to be a more permanent feature.”
Leaving with the fight still on
There is a symbolic weight to the timing of all this. Walsh gave this speech knowing it was probably his last as IATA’s chief before heading to Geneva and then on to India, where he takes over as CEO of IndiGo, an airline operating in one of the world’s fastest growing but most bureaucratically difficult markets, according to FlightGlobal. The man who spent five years arguing the airline industry’s case from the trade association side is about to argue it from inside an airline again, in a market where red tape is its own kind of headwind.
What struck me reading both accounts of the speech is how little Walsh hedged. He did not frame any of this as a shared challenge that everyone needs to work through together. He named manufacturers, oil companies, and governments as the parties responsible for specific, quantifiable costs, and he put numbers next to each one: $11 billion from supply chain failures, $4.3 billion from SAF shortfalls, $100 billion from fuel price increases that better fleet efficiency and smarter routing could have partially absorbed. Those figures do not fix themselves between AGMs. Whoever succeeds him will inherit a fight that Walsh, by his own account, chose to keep having until the very last speech.