Airlines expect to carry twice as many passengers in 20 years, with growth driven mainly by Asia, their main global trade body said Thursday.
While 4.3 billion air trips took place in 2023, the International Air Transport Association (IATA) said in early June that it expected nearly 5 billion this year.
These volumes would erase the record of 4.54 billion recorded in 2019, before the health crisis which seriously affected the sector.
In the longer term, by 2043, IATA “predicts that the number of air passengers will double” compared to 2023, or 8.6 billion passengers, “with an average annual growth rate of 3.6%”, it said in a press release.
This dynamic will be unevenly distributed across the world, and especially supported by “emerging markets such as Asia-Pacific and the Middle East,” according to the same source.
Asia-Pacific is expected to experience annual growth rates of 4.6%, driven by India (6.9%), Thailand and Vietnam (6.4%) and China (5.8%).
The Middle East and Africa, for their part, are promised air travel growth of 3.6% per year over the next two decades.
A “mature” market like North America would remain behind, at 1.7%, while Europe would grow by 2% per year. As for Latin America and the Caribbean region, IATA sees it growing by 2.9% per year in the next 20 years.
IATA’s projections, released ahead of the Farnborough Air Show in the United Kingdom, are consistent with those published Monday by Airbus, which estimates that the commercial aircraft fleet will have doubled by 2043, to 48,230 aircraft, fueled by the rise of the middle classes in Asia.
Still, IATA’s forecast is only an average, with its range for global air traffic growth being between 2.6 and 4.6 percent. The main element of uncertainty lies in the strength of economic growth, according to the organization.
If these scenarios come to fruition, they will complicate the decarbonization of the aviation sector. IATA in 2021, then the States represented at the UN in 2022, have committed to ensuring that aircraft no longer contribute to global warming by 2050. The main lever for this “net zero emissions” consists of using non-fossil fuels made from biomass and then CO2 and hydrogen, technological challenges which will mobilize colossal budgets.