Jaunted

Boeing has forecast that over the next 20 years, Southeast Asia’s airlines will require more that 2,100 new airplanes valued at approximately US$330 billion. Boeing's [Marketing VP] Tinseth shared the company’s market data and forecast... Globally, he said, airlines will need 29,000 new airplanes through 2028, valued at US$3.2 trillion... 'Travel volumes in Asia Pacific overall are large and growing rapidly,' Tinseth said. 'Asia Pacific will account for 41% of travel in 20 years’ time, up from around 32% today. In fact, in less than 10 years, Asia Pacific will easily be the largest air travel market in the world.'

Without getting too wonky, all of this is premised on growth figures for Southeast Asia that are anything but guaranteed. We walked down this path almost a decade ago, with experts insisting that Southeast Asia was the world's future economic hub—just before it became the world's current economic disaster. Shaky economies are shaky, and shaky export-driven economies like the ones they have are particularly shaky.

On the other hand, there are billions of people concentrated in a very small area with lots of economic activity. We kind of joked about this when Air Asia made a show of giving away one million tickets, since "million" only sounds like a lot when you forget that there are more than 2 billion people in the immediate area. But it wasn't a joke: the Air Asia website got slammed with 300 million hits during the campaign's first 11 hours. So yeah, there might be some people in the area looking to fly.

[Photo: Kien1980v / Wiki Commons]

Related Stories:
· Asia Pacific to Account for 41% of Travel [Asia Travel Tips]
· Boeing [Jaunted]
· Airplane News [Jaunted]