These are understandably in turn accompanied by corporate goals of enhancing the financial position and paying down debt, aligning capacity to demand, reducing costs and adopting more conservative fuel hedging positions, among others.

In these conditions, it is hard for a company to avoid adopting behaviour which is much more cautious and short-term reactive. Analysts and shareholders want restraint, in turn influencing share prices; executives, motivated by incentives issued by their boards, want to achieve share price targets; and in many ways the market simply leaves little option but to follow the herd.

Yet, aside from the lookalike profiles being created in this way, there are real dangers where all companies in an industry adopt the same approach.

This is a global market undergoing transformation, even turmoil, as age old norms are challenged, as the earth’s aviation axis shifts eastwards and as the apparent stability of the global alliances is threatened.

Change on this scale spells threats, but it also opens up new opportunities, often once-off openings. And as the established airlines line up to follow suit by being more conservative, it is the new breed, lower cost, aggressively expansive, that are moving to centre stage.

The result – to embed the process of decline even more rapidly for those legacy airlines unable or unwilling to be innovative. It will not lead to overnight collapse of the old regime, but it does risk locking in that progressive erosion of an earlier pre-eminence.

This is an extract from CAPA’s upcoming Outlook edition of its Airline Leader magazine, to be posted at airlineleader.com later this week.

CAPA meanwhile is convening its annual Airlines in Transition event on 11/12 April 2013 at the prestigious RitzCarlton Powerscourt resort in the Wicklow Mountains near Dublin, Ireland, on 11/12 April 2013, to examine in rare detail the various high level issues that shape where the world’s airlines are heading – that is: the next generations of airlines.

As low cost airlines evolve and take on more of the characteristics of full service carriers and each seeks to connect more effectively to the other, a whole array of legal, operational, strategic, commercial and technological issues arises. The Airlines in Transition forum is designed to explore how this new industry is evolving, sharing experiences from every region of the world and from a variety of airlines.

Airlines represented by their CEO/COO/CIO at Airlines in Transition include Aer Lingus, Air Arabia, bmi Regional, Brussels Airlines,, Ethiopian Airlines, HNA/Hainan Airlines, IAG, Iberia Express, Jazz Aviation, JetBlue, Lufthansa, Monarch Airlines, SATA and Vueling.

Travel Distribution touchstones also attending and speaking include Google Vice President Travel Jeremy Wertheimer, FareLogix CEO James Davidson, IATA’s Director of Passenger Services Eric Leopold, SITA’s CTO Jim Peters, Datalex’s CEO Aiden Brogan, Sabre Airline Solutions’ CCO Greg Gilchrist and Travelport’s GM Global Distribution Sales and Services Derek Sharp.

CAPA is exclusively offering WIT readers a discount delegate rate, by using this link:http://centreforaviation.com/hub/product_info.php?products_id=336