Two flaws in this article:

- it's written from the point of view of businesses that in any case have been struggling for a long time: airlines.

- it discounts the inevitable disruptors that will do things differently than the current companies in this space and makes the (broken) assumption that aside from fuel prices nothing changes.

So that's companies that have struggled to adapt historically struggling to adapt some more and not seeing a way out. In other words, a business ripe for disruption. The question is not if that disruption will come but when and in what form. What this article spells out is what would happen if the only disruption that will happen is higher fuel prices. Which is interesting only in the sense that it really makes a case for other disruption to happen.

IMHO, battery electric aviation will start disrupting short haul aviation towards the end of this decade. Adoption will be initially slow and people will be dismissive about the whole thing happening at all. But basically all the raw tech we need for this is already in place (e.g. 500wh/kg batteries by companies like CATL, Amprius, and others) and it's just going to be a matter of building/designing vehicles and infrastructure and improving the tech further as we go. All this actually started happening about half a decade ago and is actually well under way at this point. Lots of companies transitioning out of R&D into commercialization in the next few years. Some of them this year already. Not all will succeed. But the basic premise of a small, cheap electrical plane with about 600 miles of range is basically going to happen.

Why is that disruptive? Because we go from increasingly higher fuel prices to a state where the cost of fuel is a fraction of what it is now. And you can fly with zero worries about climate change because that will all be clean energy. That's going to change a few things.

A related disruption is going to be that these planes are not going to be the same size as today. The main reason that big planes are interesting is fuel cost. Only rich people can afford to fly in small planes and pretend they are sitting in a "flying" car. Because burning a few hundred gallons of fuel just isn't cheap. Flying small electrical planes on the other hand is dirt cheap and you don't get to share each other's farts. Win win.

Small electrical planes/drones are going to fix the cost of flying in a big way by at least an order of magnitude: fuel, maintenance, the ability to avoid big airports with their landing fees, etc.

Companies focused on their current business of burning fuel to move big jets full of economy class cattle around are going to have to figure out how to keep up with that. Most of them probably are not going to figure that out. E-fuels might keep some of them going and that may be the only thing that is economical for long haul at least the mid term. But most of their current short haul business is going to struggle and die. And that's not going to take 40 years to happen.

Finally, another disruption that's coming will be in the form of autonomous flight. Lots of small airplanes would require lots of pilots. Except those pilots don't exist and long before they can be trained, a lot of these planes will be able to fly themselves. That's more cost savings because once you eliminate fuel cost, pilots are the next cost bottleneck. And of course the manually operated planes also getlot easier to fly . Meaning the training of new pilots gets a lot easier over time as well.

All that together is starting to happen this decade. It will take ages for the aviation world to adjust of course. But that doesn't mean it's not happening. And once it starts happening it will start happening a lot quicker driven by cost savings and investors waking up and smelling money.