It is a common mantra that 9/11, whose fifth anniversary was marked earlier this week, forever changed air travel.While there is truth in this, it is not the full truth. Airlines were in trouble on September 10, 2001 and would have had to change the way they operated sooner or later.
The tragic events of September 11 in New York and Washington and the subsequent sharp drop in passengers accelerated that need to change.
Five years on, the result is that airlines have changed substantially and, as Nejib Ben-Kheder, president of Sabre Airlines Solutions' consulting business, said, a new breed of airline is emerging.
Mr Ben-Kheder, speaking at the GCC Low Cost Airlines conference in Dubai, said it was best described as a "value-focused carrier" (VFC) which sought to adopt the best practices of the low cost carriers (LCCs) and the traditional airlines.
He said they were best defined by their "focused fare structures, relatively cheap sales distribution arrangements, limited array of partnerships and streamlined ground operations."
It's an airline, he said, that "applies its resources in very specific markets, competing on a combination of price and a product that differentiates it from traditional carriers, while managing costs tightly."
They are valued focused but they are not no frills, he said.
He gives as examples of these new VFC, flybe in the UK, JetBlue in America and Kingfisher in India. However there are not just many more but also many other airlines which have partially changed their model to make themselves more of a VFC.
easyJet is a different model to Ryanair, which remains perhaps the most rigidly LLC in Europe, and in turn easyJet is different in its attitude to corporates and business compared to Air Berlin and Germanwings.
At the other end of the scale, BA, Aer Lingus and bmi have all moved from the traditional model to embrace something of the low cost model.
Mr Ben-Kheder touched on the reasons for these changes but it has been a painful journey for most of them, involving substantial losses and brushes with bankruptcy.
The US-based Business Travel Coalition (BTC) has produced an analysis of US Commercial Air Transportation since 9/11 which lists some of the factor forcing change. These include a collapse in the business travel segment yields, a fall off in the short haul market, new security requirements, SARS, labour problems, bankruptcies, the growth of video and wed conferencing and the expanding LCCs. Most of these apply also to Europe.
The BTC authors, Kevin Mitchell, its chairman, Robert Crandall, former American Airlines' chairman and Vaughn Cordle, ceo of Airline Forecast, remark: "Between 2001 and 2003 when the majors (traditional carriers) were essentially in denial that there was a shift in the marketplace, a window of opportunity opened for the LCCs to grow their collective market share."
They seized that chance with both hands. The latest figures from OAG (see this week's news story 'LCCs main drivers of aviation growth') show low cost carriers now account for 17% of all seat sales and 15% of all flights across the world with about 18% of the flights in Europe and the US operated by LCCs. These figures have doubled since 2002.
This perhaps was the time that the aviation industry changed forever when the traditionals were reeling under the various pressures and the LCCs stepped in to steal their markets.
But that process has also moved on from the simple switch by passengers from traditionals to LCCs.
Business travellers historically want some kind of special treatment, like fast tracking or being looked after while on board.
So while traditionals adopted the LCCs fare models and lower prices, they in turn, or rather some of them, now offer better treatment of passengers.
The choice available and the ease of self-booking have also given regular travellers an element of power they did not enjoy a decade ago.
But the process Mr Ben-Kheder describes is a continuing one. The wise airlines will go on adapting to changing conditions and demands while travellers will continue to decide the balance they want between the price, frequency and level of customer services which each airline offers.