Asia-Pacific aviation market bright

Asia-Pacific aviation market bright

NEW DELHI (AFP): The Asia-Pacific region will comprise a third of the world's aviation market in two decades, with an average annual travel growth of 6.6 percent, U.S.- based Boeing Co.'s chief for India said Wednesday.

"The future market for airplanes clearly is outside of the United States," Dinesh Keskar told a news conference here late Wednesday.

"The Asia-Pacific region will constitute 33 percent of the world's aviation market by 2016. North America will record the second largest growth at 28 percent and in Europe it will be about 16 percent.

"The world fleet, which was 11,500 in 1996, will grow to 23,600 in 2016," he said, adding that the 16,160 new jets would be worth US$1.1 trillion.

Keskar said the highest annual air travel growth after the Asia-Pacific would be in Latin America (6.4 percent), followed by the trans-Pacific route (5.7 percent), Europe (4.4 percent) and North America (3.1 percent).

"But the figures can be somewhat misleading because the traffic in North America, the trans-Atlantic and Europe are already way ahead," he said.

"In India, which has a middle class of about 150 million, we have 100 planes. In the United States, there are an equal number of people who could fly and their fleet is currently about 6,000."

Keskar said a Boeing study released in Renton, Washington on Wednesday predicted that India would spend 16.6 billion dollars on 250 planes over the next 20 years.

"The traffic is phenomenal. I tried booking a flight to the United States on December 15 by Air India and was told the earliest available booking was only on Jan. 25.

"I came on a fully booked flight to New Delhi from Bombay to attend this press conference. I was late because of the long line of cars. New Delhi airport is getting worse than a bus stand."

But Keskar echoed a warning by other aviation experts than only a handful of airports in the region were equipping themselves for the travel boom.

"Singapore is planning to add a Changi 3 and Hong Kong's new airport will become operational soon. But elsewhere, the airports are getting saturated and very little is being done by way of modernization or expansion."

In December, Pierre Jeanniot, director-general of the International Air Transport Association (IATA), said Asian air traffic was expected to grow on average by 8.6 percent a year between 1990 and 2010.

Jeanniot however pointed to undersized infrastructure, manpower shortages and poor regional coordination as major impediments and called on governments to plan infrastructure investment and strengthen regional coordination on air traffic control and route management.