It takes less than a second for the current world population to change – you can watch humanity grow live and it’s pretty amazing. When this article was written, 7.716 billion people lived on Earth. By the time you have finished reading it, around 540 babies will have come to this world while 180 people will have passed away. The United Nations established World Population Day on the 11th of July and Skycop is looking at the statistics of the ever-changing numbers of humanity globally and how they impact the aviation industry.
The future of aviation: more than 7 billion flyers per year
It took a bit more than 200 years for the world population to skyrocket from 1 billion in 1804 to 7.7 billion in 2019. The United Nations projects that in the year 2055, there will be 10 billion people on Earth. And if you were born in 1987, you have the chance to witness the world population double in your lifetime. That’s fascinating and scary at the same time.
Naturally, this population increase impacted a lot of different fields – and the aviation industry is not an exception. According to the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO), a total of 4.3 billion passengers were carried by air transport on scheduled services in 2018. This indicates a 6.1% increase over 2017.
But if you compare the air passenger’s numbers to a total world population, you may get the wrong impression that more than half of the people on this planet get to fly. That’s far from the truth.
According to National Geographic, just less than 20% of the world’s population has set foot on an airplane. But that’s changing dramatically.
The International Air Transport Association (IATA) predicts that the number of air travellers will balloon to 7.2 billion by 2035 – nearly twice the current levels. Most of this boost in traffic will come from the Asia-Pacific region (which includes Asia, Australia, and New Zealand), with China set to overtake the U.S. as the largest aviation market in the world around 2024 and India set to displace the U.K. for the third place around 2025.
Chinese tourism grew by more than a thousand percent
According to U.S. airplane manufacturer Boeing, worldwide demand for aircraft will top 39,000 planes in the next 20 years. The company states that air travel market is projected to be 2.5 times larger in upcoming to decades and that the global commercial jet fleet will grow to accommodate, doubling in size by 2038. The aviation industry is targeting Asia and the continent is being seen as the future front line for the business. Boeing expects China to be the first trillion-dollar aviation market.
National Geographic predicts the need for growth in aviation staff numbers as well. Over the next 20 years, as thousands of new planes are added to the fleets, the demand for crew to fly and maintain them will only rise. More than 2 million new staff will be required by the year 2035: 617,000 pilots, 679,000 technicians, and 814,000 cabin crew members.
And most likely they gonna welcome Asian travellers on board. According to the United Nations World Tourism Organisation, Chinese tourists spent 277.3 billion dollars overseas in 2018, up from around 10 billion in the year 2000. In the first year of the new millennium, the Chinese made only 10.5 million overseas trips. By last year, that number had increased by 1326% to 149.7 million.
The number of air travellers is rapidly growing not only because the world’s population is expanding. We fly 63% cheaper than in 1995 – that’s because low-cost airlines are expanding aggressively, especially in Asia.
And while we are flying more often, the chance to face a disrupted flight is also being more likely, too. In that case, Skycop is ready to help you. We will turn your delayed, cancelled or overbooked flight into a compensation up to €600. That‘s the last and the most important figure you must remember.
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