Aircraft manufacturer Airbus says Australia and New Zealand are expected to outpace the rest of the developed world in terms of passenger growth.
Airbus chief operating officer for customers, John Leahy, says airlines in the South Pacific, a region dominated by the two trans-Tasman markets, will require an additional 630 new aircraft over the next 20 years, worth about $US87 billion ($A96.31 billion).
Traffic in the region is expected to grow at five per cent a year, the fastest pace among developed markets and above the worldwide average of 4.7 per cent.
And Mr Leahy expects this surge in demand to help push Airbus’s share of aircraft flying for Australian and New Zealand carriers from its current 24 per cent to somewhere near 50 per cent.
Australia’s close proximity to the emerging Asian economies of China and India left it well-placed to take advantage of an improving gross domestic product (GDP) and more encouraging business conditions, Airbus said its latest Global Market Forecast.
“World travel is very highly correlated to GDP growth, you can’t have one without the other,” Mr Leahy told journalists in a briefing in Sydney on Wednesday.
Also, the continued rise of so-called low cost carriers in Asia, which currently have 12 per cent of the domestic market in the region, would help stimulate demand for air travel.
“Low cost carriers, in and of themselves, when they get a bigger piece of the pie, stimulate demand for even more traffic,” Mr Leahy said.
The Asia-Pacific region was expected to have the highest share of airline passenger traffic by 2028 at 33 per cent, displacing North America from top spot to third on 20 per cent.
Europe was predicted to remain in third spot at 26 per cent.
Looking at the global picture, Airbus said that airlines were expected to buy 24,951 new planes over the next 20 years, to add to their fleet and replace older aircraft.
Of those, 1,729 would be for so called “very large aircraft” such as the A380, as long-haul traffic increases and as more “mega cities” emerge. Continued…
