Premium #140 – There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.

Benjamin Disraeli made these words famous while aerospace keeps them current. Industry forecasts are difficult work. The major OEMs and independent firms have teams of highly educated people working on annual forecasts, with access to every imaginable input, and spend considerable time putting them together. As with any forecast, the question is not whether you will be right or wrong, but how close you come to reality.

So why do forecasts vary as much as they do? If everyone has access to or uses the same inputs, why are forecasts, in many instances, not even close to each other? Take a look at this table, which covers the narrow-body segment up to 200 seats. While we could also have included the wide-body sector and focused on the differences in Boeing and Airbus forecasts (which seem to favor the segments in which they have products), the narrow-body and regional markets are interesting because of the number of participants and disparity between forecasts.