A bad year for airlines – but don’t ditch your stocks

It’s been a summer that most airline executives would no doubt rather forget. But it seems it is the passengers rather than the airlines themselves who will suffer.

It's been a summer that most airline executives would no doubt rather forget. First there was the World Cup, which kept air travellers glued to their television sets for the course of the tournament; then there was the foiled terrorist plot, which caused havoc in Britain's airports. Now a series of headline-grabbing crashes overseas have focused negative attention on the sector again.

Russia's abysmal air-safety record took another blow last week when a Tupolev 154 crashed and burst into flames in eastern Ukraine during a storm, killing all 170 people on board, in the country's third major air disaster since May. The crash made 2006 the worst year on record for air travel in Russia and re-ignited all the old worries about its maintenance and training procedures.

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