As the U.S. airline industry begins to celebrate the signs that it might at last be seeing an end of the devastating effects of the global economic downturn, one senior executive has voiced his doubts. Gary Kelly, chairman of Southwest Airlines says that he doesn’t feel comfortable about the predictions that the business traveller will be back in 2010. He said that even though he believed that the situation concerning a lack of business revenue would not get any worse he did not want to celebrate prematurely about the situation getting any better.

U.S. Airlines along with United, Delta and American all had slightly more positive predictions. Speaking at the Next Generation Research conference held in New York, treasurer and vice president of American Airlines, Beverly Goulet said that by reducing capacity they had seen signs of improvement especially in the domestic market. She went on to say that even though revenue for the airline was predicted to be down in the fourth quarter the rate of decline in profits appeared to be slowing.

Hank Halter, chief financial officer at the world’s largest carrier Delta said that he predicted profits to turn positive during 2010. The airline’s CFO, Kathy Mikells went on to say that even though Delta had performed less well than many of its rivals during the global economic crisis she predicted that it would perform better as the world’s economies recovered.

Even though Kelly said he could not see business travellers returning en masse to the airline next year he pointed out that he was pleased with Southwest’s on-time record.