Sobo Aviation Research applies the tools of economics — demand forecasting, financial analysis, and market study — to aircraft, operators, and the markets they serve.
Latest research
Monthly arrivals are seasonal, capital planning is not. A model that carries the seasonal structure forecasts ten held-out months to within 1.72%; the same model without it misses by twice as much — and fails its residual diagnostics outright.
The firm
Aviation runs on long-dated, capital-heavy commitments — which aircraft, which routes, which markets, at what point in the cycle. Fleet orders are placed years ahead of the traffic they serve, and each one is expensive to reverse. Decisions on that timescale deserve evidence rather than intuition.
Sobo Aviation Research is a single-principal firm built to supply that evidence: demand studies, forecasts, unit economics, and financial models. The work is independent, method-forward, and written to be inspected — assumptions stated, diagnostics reported, and limitations named rather than buried.
That last point is the operating principle. A forecast that cannot be interrogated is not research; it is a number with a decimal point. Every note published here reports what the model failed at alongside what it got right.
Capabilities
Market research
Sizing routes, fleets, and segments. Competitive landscape and demand studies that establish where a market currently sits and which direction the evidence points.
Demand forecasting
Time-series and econometric forecasting of traffic, flight volumes, and utilisation. Seasonal ARIMA and smoothing methods, reported with the residual diagnostics that tell you whether to trust the result.
Economic analysis
Cost structures, unit economics, and feasibility studies grounded in applied microeconomics — the drivers behind a route, a fleet decision, or a business case.
Financial analysis
Discounted-cash-flow and cash-flow modelling, capital-structure and return analysis for aircraft and operators. Models are delivered open, with the inputs exposed rather than hard-coded.
Contact