ECONOMIST: Airlines may be sicker than ever, but their executives have not lost their appetite for conferences where they pore over the entrails to see if there is any hope of recovery. At the third annual aviation conference run by The Economist magazine on 4 February a packed one-day event at the London Marriott Grosvenor Square was dominated by two subjects: the rise of low-cost carriers everywhere, and the fall of the network airlines in America. Instead of executives from easyJet and Ryanair strutting their stuff, however, it was a case of analysts and executives from mainstream carriers examining the phenomenon on both sides of the Atlantic. Frederick Reid, president of Delta Air Lines and James Beer, head of American Airlines in Europe, gave grim accounts of the struggle of the two carriers to stay alive. Mr Beer detailed the measures, such as de-peaking flights at main hubs in Chicago and Dallas, which have allowed more efficient use of aircraft. But all the streamlining in the world has yielded only half the $4bn annual savings AA needs to rapidly stop bleeding cash at a rate of $5m a day. He announced that AA was talking to its labour force, seeking a further $1.8bn per year savings from them. Mr Reid was equally bleak, saying that the network carrier model was in danger of extinction if the mainstream airlines did not find a way of matching costs to the lower revenues they now had to live with. The Economist”s Iain Carson, the doyen of aviation industry writers, chaired the proceedings in his inimitable way. http://www.economistconferences.com