Backlogs of Airbus A380 and Boeing 747-8 are under siege.

In 2008, when slot values at London Heathrow Airport were at their peak, Continental Airlines paid more than $200 million to acquire four landing slot-pairs. Four years later, Delta Air Lines has struck a deal to acquire 49% of Virgin Atlantic—which controls 44 long-haul landing slot pairs at Heathrow—from Singapore Airlines for the bargain-basement price of $360 million.

A U.K. project to use air traffic radar data to improve the environmental performance of aircraft operating into airports has led to reduced CO2 and fuel-burn levels.

These are the airlines that are likely to provide the industry's biggest talking points.

That airlines' financial performance globally appears to be slowly improving is being interpreted by the International Air Transport Association (IATA) as due to restructuring and cost-cutting, and not as a result of world economic growth.

Test flights of Rolls-Royce's upgraded Trent 1000 Package C configuration for Boeing's stretched 787-9 are underway on the engine maker's 747-200 flying testbed in Tucson, Ariz.

The U.K. coalition government sees the manufacturing sector—and the aerospace industry in particular—as a means of lifting the country out of the economic doldrums and onto a path to growth. But industry leaders are concerned that a lack of skills and perhaps more critically, interest in engineering from the up-and-coming generation of workers could starve the U.K. of aerospace growth at a time when industry is finally getting government support it needs.

The airline industry could be poised to regain the upward momentum that faltered badly in 2011, with new analysis signaling that the decline has leveled off and even started to reverse.