China No.2 aircraft market

China No.2 aircraft market

SHANGHAI (Reuters): China will be the world's biggest commercial aviation market outside the United States over the next 20 years, U.S. aircraft giant Boeing Co said on Friday.

The official Xinhua news agency quoted Boeing's Vice President of Commercial Marketing Randy Baseler as telling a news conference for Chinese journalists he expected China's air traffic exceed the global average rate of growth by far.

A Boeing spokesman confirmed the comment.

He said Boeing expected China's aviation market to expand by an average of 9.1 percent a year between 2000 and 2019, far outpacing the firm's forecast of annual global growth of 4.8 percent in the same period.

China would require an additional 1,790 airplanes during that period with a total value of $137 billion, the spokesman said.

Of that, 60 percent would be single-aisle planes, 26 percent twin-aisle, six percent wide-bodied planes and the remaining eight percent would be regional jets with 100 seats or fewer, he added.