Accordingly, the airlines mostly focused their strategies on growth, which consequently meant that aircraft manufacturers were used to a relatively stable demand of their products. Both international and regional airports have set themselves the objective of expanding the capacity.

The ScMI AG applied the internationally recognized method of the Scenario Management in order to demonstrate possible futures of the civil air transport. The detailed knowledge regarding the air transport industry comes from the partner of ScMI, Franz Tessum, former vice president of the Knowledge and Scenario Management at EADS/Daimler-Chrysler Aerospace (DASA). The air transport industry and its environment were described by means of 54 key factors. Using a network analysis, 21 key factors which are characteristic for the development of the industry were selected. Taking into account the consistency of the alternative future scenarios developed for the key factors, five alternative scenarios for 2020 arise which are outlined in the following:

• General growth in the air transport industry dominated by long-haul flights in the light of sharply increased competition in the manufacturing industry
• Split of the industry with great growth in the regional aviation
• General growth of the air transport industry which is divided into independent long and short distance segments
• All-round-airlines dominates the branch and use small carriers as feeders
• Slowly growing air transport industry with a focus on exclusive long-haul flights and high service quality

These five scenarios generally show the different development opportunities in the field of air transport.

Scenarios developed on the basis of the method of Scenario-Management are based on plausible combinations of future projections. They therefore do not contain any statement about the scenario’s development trend in the first step.