15 minutes with: Jeremy Irwin

How would you describe your role to someone you’d never met before?

There are two ways I’d describe my job. First, I buy and sell airports or airlines, helping prospective buyers to understand whether a specific airport or airline is a good investment and is cost sustainable, and whether there are any other risk and regulation issues. The second thing I do is help commercial aviation businesses – both airlines and airports – to be better businesses. As an independent party, we can help leadership teams to cut through the noise, understand problems, and design implementable solutions.

What makes PA stand out in the aviation market?

I worked for 10 years in airlines – I started at Qantas, then went to Air New Zealand and Virgin Atlantic. All my roles were across commercial planning, finance, and strategy. In these roles, I observed other consultancies create plans that struggled to work in practice. PA is different. What attracted me to PA, and what I see every day, is a deeply knowledgeable, competent, and credible aviation team that understands how an airport or an airline works. Our team have significant industry experience; that means we know how airlines work, and what you can and cannot do, which means our advice is grounded in realism. We work in a very hands-on way with our clients to deliver more than a North Star strategy or blue-sky thinking.

For example, in our work with TUI, we’ve become trusted advisors. We give them messages they don’t always want to hear. A lot of consultancies won’t do that. The chief commercial officer at TUI told me that the unique thing about PA is that we’re willing to share uncomfortable information as we strive to deliver greater value, which builds trust.

What key challenges are your clients grappling with right now?

In an increasingly competitive marketplace, leadership teams aren’t super confident in their strategic path. Leadership teams aren’t sure how to play in the market, and they can’t always articulate their real capability or what makes them shine. We help them answer those questions, and build greater confidence and credibility in their own business. A lot of airports still have delayed investment transactions after COVID-19. So, many airports are coming up for sale, with an irregular set of problems. Some have infrastructure that hasn’t caught up with exponential traffic growth, while some have completely the opposite problem, and are really struggling to be sustainable long-term. There’s an additional challenge in how to attract a future investor, building the case to deliver an asset that generates enough return to be sustainable.

Another important hurdle is how to make regional aviation infrastructure financially sustainable over time. I’ve come to specialise in regional airlines, which is a crucial part of the industry. Regional aviation is essential in many places, helping to connect rural, remote regions with larger population centres in countries. We’ve done a lot of work in Australia to analyse how regional aviation infrastructure can become financially sustainable. These regional airports are vital for economic development, cargo, and day-to-day life in a way that’s very different to London, Paris, or New York airports.

How are we helping clients to fly past those challenges?

For regional aviation, we look at how strategic operating models can be complemented by government investments and capital expenditure, how to underwrite critical air route flying, and how to make the case that an asset in the middle of nowhere is a critical piece of national infrastructure. We do a lot of international benchmarking. For example, we’re helping a government understand how other OECD countries and international peers are creating policy and regulation that allows greater long-term financial sustainability in regional aviation, offering foresight into the capital expenditure needed across airports and airlines to replace aircraft. Many regional airlines have very old aircraft that just keep being maintained. But you can only do that for so long – at some point, it needs to be replaced, so we help airlines set a clear pathway for doing so.

From a broader airport investment perspective, we help clients to navigate an industry where traffic demand grew rapidly after COVID-19 but has now plateaued. Airlines face significant additional costs as emissions trading schemes come into play, which may impact traffic demand over time. Some airline groups are forecasting up to 20 percent reductions in airline traffic as operating costs are passed on to the consumer. So, we help our clients to generate enough traffic and revenues to cover their cost base and generate a strong return.

What trends are you seeing in the aviation market?

Three big bets are shaping aviation: data and AI, carbon economics, and operational excellence. The first is about leveraging different data platforms, AI, and machine learning to drive greater efficiency in airport operations and make day-to-day operations on the route more predictive. The second is the cost of economic regulation around carbon taxation and accounting – a big focus area for us in our work with clients. As part of this, we also guide sustainable aviation fuel (SAF) strategies for airports including Manchester Airports Group (MAG) and Brisbane, helping them work out where and how to play in a relatively new market. Do they act as a conveyor? Do they become an aggregator for demand? How do they supply the market as mandates come into effect? It’s an infrastructure challenge rather than a broad buying and selling challenge, and it brings in lots of different parts, from pure strategy to market demand and forecasting. The third big trend is around operational excellence, transforming day-to-day performance and customer experience. That links to making journeys more predictive, and building a more intuitive customer experience using data and AI that drives greater return and value from customers.

Of the projects you've worked on, which have delivered the biggest impact?

I’m Australian, so I’ve really enjoyed working in Australia over the last year. One assignment started as a commercial and technical due diligence project for a major regional airline, which was on the brink of collapse. The government was going to step in as buyer of last resort. If it collapsed, many regional communities in Australia would lose connection with the rest of the country. There aren’t railways like there are in Europe, and it’s an eight- or nine-hour drive to the next urban centre. The business needed to become commercially and financially viable long-term. But there were a bunch of technical problems with aircraft, chronic underinvestment across the business, and high staff attrition. All of this impacted customer demand, because the airline wasn’t seen as reliable. Would the flight turn up? How could the fleet be more reliable?

We conducted an economic analysis of airport infrastructure, including policy perspectives, and recommendations to deliver better services and connectivity for Australians. In our analysis, we found that all airports were previously owned and operated by the military, but after the Second World War were transferred to local councils with financial terms set in perpetuity. This left councils without sustainable funding, or a blueprint for how to run the airport. In one region, the same person who manages the airport, also manages the local swimming pool. A decision made decades ago is having ramifications today, leading to a significant gap in capital expenditure.

Airports are part of critical national infrastructure, so how can they get the right funding to support growth without impacting other community services? We assessed the CapEx debt and levels of catch-up CapEx investment and how airport ownership changes could improve day-to-day financing to support more equitable service levels across airports. We’ve been re-engaged to work on refinancing projects for other regional Australian airlines in distressed positions, and we’ve conducted other aviation economic benchmarking research in Australia.

Another impactful project was a 2025 detailed outbound market forecast for a European airline group, exploring UK leisure demand over the next five years . In this study, we forecast positive UK outbound leisure demand passenger growth of 2.8 percent to 2030.

Each quarter, we survey 5,000 of the provider’s customers, mapping their sentiment. Through this work, we’ve identified important strategic shifts to help the business thrive. This relationship demonstrates the long-term, practical, solid advice we give, which builds a trusted partnership.

Are you using AI in your work?

I’m using AI to be more efficient, more creative and subsequently deliver more for our clients, faster. That means I can spend more time supporting on thorny issues. A day-to-day example of this involved reviewing hundreds of documents submitted to an aviation public government consultation. Applying AI allowed us to identify key themes rapidly and link consistencies between the responses to identify the urgency and risks of topics for the client.

In 2025 I was part of an interesting project exploring how to apply AI in airlines, using predictive Machine Learning (ML) from a planning perspective. PA’s applied ML and predictive call-to-gate work at a major European hub which balanced terminal lag congestion and revenue impact. We identified the ratios at which we could drive congestion reduction (7.2 percent) with a neutral revenue impact. We can predict outcomes across passenger delay, revenue and speed through the terminal.

What advice would you give to somebody who wanted to do what you do?

All I ever wanted to do was work in aviation. We lived near an Air Force Base in Australia and when I was a kid I would lie in the garden watching the Roulettes practice. I started flying when I was at school and stacked shelves at Woolworths to pay for my pilot’s licenses. So, my advice is that if you have a passion for something, go for it.

Professionally there are two more bits of advice I’d give. One, be inquisitive. I’ve had the opportunity to live and work around the world. I went to university in China, and lived in Beijing and New Zealand before I moved to the UK. If you have opportunities, just say yes. Be inquisitive about different people, different cultures, different problems. I think that’s really important. Two, use common sense. Aviation is a complex industry, but often problems can be fixed with a bit of critical thinking. It’s about understanding what’s influenced a situation, and how changes of behaviour or processes can drive a better outcome. It’s about taking a step back, critically assessing the problem, and finding a common-sense solution.

What are your future goals?

My current professional goal is to take the next step in my career. On a personal level, I’ve been trying to learn French, largely to impress my mother-in-law but also because I can apply for French citizenship… But it’s a hard language to learn precisely!