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Danger in the Air
Aviation Pricing up Sharply
The horrors of airline disasters have been flashing on cable news for 24 hours, seven days a week, for months.
Four months ago, Malaysian Airlines Flight MG370 disappeared en route to Beijing with 239 passengers. Then on July 17, pro-Russian rebels apparently blasted Malaysian Airlines Flight MH17 out of the sky over eastern Ukraine, killing all 298 passengers on board.
While The Guardian asked the legitimate question of whether Malaysian Airlines will survive the double-header disasters, the aviation insurance industry on the whole appears to be on solid ground.
“For the most part is, there hasn’t been a real knee-jerk reaction,” said Garrett Hanrahan, U.S. aviation practice leader for Marsh in Dallas. “The market has been rational in the way that it has approached what has happened.”
That’s saying something, given what the market is facing.
The war hull market takes in $60 million in worldwide premium but is looking at 10 times that in losses from recent events, estimated Hanrahan’s colleague, Brian Glod, Marsh’s U.S. airline practice leader in New York.
That includes paying out the full property value of MH17 as well as half of the missing Malaysian plane (with all-risk aviation taking the other half; common practice in these “unknown cause” scenarios).
Video: This report from the Canadian Broadcasting Corp. looks at how Malaysia Airlines Flight MH17 ended up flying in the volatile Eastern Ukraine region.
Then, there’s the biggest event from a monetary standpoint: a two-day battle between rebel groups in July that destroyed up to 12 aircraft at Tripoli’s airport in Libya. This event’s total losses could be upward of $500 million, Glod said.
While war hull underwriters may not be panicking, as Hanrahan suggested, they are looking to collect.
Paul Tuhy, head of XL’s Global Aviation business, reported he’s heard of rate increases in the market of 300 percent to 1,000 percent.
The other aviation coverage impacted is primary hull and liability, and underwriters there can be expected to recover losses in upcoming premiums. They’re also getting hit with the July 24 crash of Air Algerie Flight 5017, where terrorism was ruled out, and the July 23 crash of TransAsia Flight GE222, mostly likely caused by weather.
“I do think the market will react with rate increases,” Tuhy said, indicating it’s been a soft market looking for a rationale to pivot.
Still, underwriters aren’t panicking because, as A.M. Best reported in a briefing on MH-17, no ratings actions will result from the losses.
That, and the competitiveness in the primary aviation market, means ample availability.
“There still is an enormous amount of capacity in the aviation insurance marketplace, and that is keeping a lid on the pot,” said Hanrahan, echoing the conclusions of the Best report.
Airlines appear to be handling the spate of incidents in stride as well. Recent news reports (such as this article in The Economist) have made much of airlines’ decisions to reroute (or not reroute) flights away from Ukraine and other war zones.
These decisions, said Glod, are coming from senior management, well above the risk manager’s head.
But risk managers will be the ones asked by underwriters about flight paths and whether their planes will come close to hotspots.
“They’re asking those questions now,” Glod said, of underwriters.
The result could be a tiered underwriting approach, Hanrahan said, where insurers will break down operators’ risk geographically — where do they fly to, over and from?
In such a system, U.S. operators — which are “extremely diligent and cautious,” said Glod — most likely will not pay a disproportionate amount of the rate increases.
XL confirmed that it has been asking about plane flight paths, said Tuhy.
These terrible incidents do not happen very often, he said, but “but when they do happen, they’re bad.”
