Most people in the Asia Rising community understand how important transportation links are to the world economy and air travel makes up a significant portion of the global movement of goods and people.

The International Air Transport Association is the industry trade association that represents 250 of the world’s airlines which account for 84% of all air traffic.The IATA expects that 1% of world GDP will be spent on air transport this year, that’s a whopping $820 billion. As an industry, air travel is accelerating with anticipated growth of 7% for 2015, which will be the best growth since 2010 and well above the average 5.5% growth trend of the past 20 years. And thanks to falling fuel costs they predict that the average return airfare will drop 5.1% from 2014’s average to $458 (before surcharges and tax). As well the cost of air shipping freight should also fall by 5.8%.

The industry is growing and more than half of all the worldwide growth occurring in Asia Pacifc and the Middle East. Asia Pacific carriers recorded an increase of 5.8 per cent last year while capacity rose 7.0 per cent. Like most industries, the airline industry is heavily counting on Asia.
Air travel has much more importance in the global community than I think most people realize. Not only do airlines help the flow of business and leisure travel as well as cargo, but there are also many other knockoff social, economic and cultural benefits as well. The IATA estimates that $7.3 trillion dollars of goods will be shipped by air this year and that travelers will spend about $644 billion dollars on plane tickets. The net sum of all this air travel is the related services industries that support airlines (catering, maintenance, etc) was responsible for 518 million jobs in 2012. We suspect that in 2015 the total number of ‘supply chain’ jobs will be even larger.