Gregory Polek has spent his entire career in aviation journalism with AIN, starting as a proofreader and assistant to then-managing editor Mary Mahoney in 1995 after serving an internship with&nbsp;New Jersey Monthly&nbsp;magazine and completing his B.A. degree in English/Writing at New Jersey’s William Paterson College. By 1997 Polek accepted a position as an associate editor, covering the regional airline beat for&nbsp;Aviation International News&nbsp;in place of retiring industry veteran Don Anderson. The assignment took Polek across North America and Europe to profile regional airlines varying in size and mission from the likes of floatplane operators Kenmore Air and Chalk’s Ocean Airways to regional jet operators such as SkyWest and American Eagle. Today, in his dual role as Air Transport Editor and International Airshow Editor, Polek writes, edits, and manages AIN’s commercial aviation content while overseeing each of the company’s daily international air show publications in Paris, Farnborough, Singapore, and Dubai. Most recently Polek has assumed oversight of daily coverage of the Helicopter Association International’s annual Heli-Expo convention.

Senior Editor

Gregory Polek

Now accounting for about 31 percent of the global fleet of commercial aircraft, the Asia-Pacific region already ranks as the largest market for the world’s airliner manufacturers. Even as parts of the region recover more slowly than the rest of the world from the economic effects of the Covid pandemic, the prospects for future growth appear brighter than ever given the size of its upwardly mobile population, the availability of lower-cost capital, and arguably more liberal regulatory environments. &nbsp;
One country with which most people wouldn’t associate liberal regulatory policy—China—saw the effects of Covid result in the steepest declines in traffic in the region and among the slowest to recover from the pandemic. According to statistics compiled by the International Air Transport Association, the country’s international traffic volume remains some 60 percent below pre-2019 levels. Still, according to IATA vice president of Asia-Pacific Philip Goh, China’s trajectory will account for a major piece of the wider region’s recovery.
“Pre-Covid, China was a major source of foreign visitors to many countries in the Asia Pacific,” Goh told AIN. “In some cases, Chinese travelers accounted for as much as 20- to 30 percent of total visitor arrivals. While China reopened borders early in 2023, the Chinese government only allowed the full resumption of group outbound tours from China during the second&nbsp;half of [the year]. Hence, it will take time before we see the benefits of Chinese visitors traveling in large numbers.”
As if to highlight China’s importance to the overall health of the region’s air transport sector, Oliver Wyman consultancy partner Andrei Grskovic noted that the People’s Republic accounts for 43 percent of the region’s fleet and that the country generated 60 percent of incremental fleet growth over the past two decades. Grskovic attributes the comparatively slow recovery of the Asia-Pacific region largely to the late reopening of China and what he calls draconian country-specific border closures in places such as Singapore.
As a result, Asia-Pacific air traffic has recovered to about 90 percent of pre-Covid levels, due largely to strong domestic demand in China and India. Overall, Oliver Wyman sees a long-term return to 6- to 8 percent annual growth thanks to population growth, disposable income growth, improved airport infrastructure, and more affordable travel from startups and low-cost carriers (LCCs).
While more airliners reside in China than in any other country in the region, Indian carriers have accumulated an order backlog of 1,800 airplanes, the largest in the Asia-Pacific bloc. Recognizing the cultivation of supply chains and partnerships in those countries as almost obligatory, both Airbus and Boeing must build on the establishment of what the Oliver Wyman partner called “commercial offsets.” Boeing for years has benefitted from projects such as the 737 completion and delivery center it operates with Comac in Zhoushan, a composite parts factory in Tianjin, and a service center and training facility in Shanghai. However, geopolitical tensions over Taiwan, for example, have made it more difficult to expand on those relationships in China, where orders have slowed to a trickle for the U.S. company.
Airbus appears to have taken full advantage of the opening left by soured U.S.-China relations, and last April agreed to open a second A320 assembly line in Tianjin, where it has operated a single line under a joint venture with AVIC since 2008. The deal paid immediate dividends, accompanying an order for 150 A320-family jets and 15 A350-900 widebodies.
Now, Airbus has set its sights on further developing its supply chain in India, noted Grskovic.
“But what Airbus has been really strategic about over the past 10, even 15 years, is moving their supply chain in terms of commercial offsets into those fast-growing countries,” he explained. “But India is now their number-one supply chain initiative, from a low-cost perspective. You're seeing a significant amount of investment in the supply chain and a lot of work. So if you think about just wings or spoilers or landing gear, components of those are starting to move into India.”
Perhaps not coincidentally, Airbus has seen runaway sales success with Indian low-fare airlines such as IndiGo, whose A320 order backlog stands at 1,330 after a 500-unit deal signed last June. Boeing, too, has accumulated a substantial backlog in India, most notably with Air India, which during last year’s Paris Airshow ordered 190 of the U.S. company’s 737 Max narrowbodies, 20 787 Dreamliners, and 10 777X widebodies with options for 50 Max jets and 20 Dreamliners.
<h2>Asia Pacific Now 40 Percent of Global Airliner Backlog</h2>
Overall, the number of firm orders placed by carriers in the Asia-Pacific region stands at nearly 6,000, which represents about 40 percent of the global backlog. In the decade prior to the onset of Covid, the region accounted for 42 percent of cumulative global production. According to Oliver Wyman, that share looks likely to hold steady if not increase.
Apart from Boeing and Airbus, beneficiaries include Brazil’s Embraer and Franco-Italian turboprop maker ATR, both of which have virtually cornered their respective market segments in the region. In Embraer’s case, 194 aircraft operate with 15 airlines, including four carriers from China, two from Mongolia, and nine throughout the rest of the region. Among the carriers that account for another 20 aircraft on backlog, Singapore’s Scoot awaits delivery of nine E-190-E2s, Malaysia’s SKS Airways holds an order for 10 E195-E2s, and Australia’s Pionair accounts for a single E190-E2.
Flying 38 E190s and 20 E195s, China’s Tianjin Airlines ranks as the biggest Embraer operator in the region, followed closely by Japan’s J-Air, which flies 18 E170s and 14 E190s, and Australia’s Alliance Air, which plans to add 28 used E-Jets to its current fleet of 35 E190s.
Embraer preaches the need to avoid “one-size-fits-all” thinking among airlines in Asia-Pacific, where, it says, high-growth emerging markets juxtapose with established mature economies. As a result, airlines either prioritize capacity growth or capacity discipline prevails. Both scenarios favor E-Jets, the company insists, due to their ability to serve new point-to-point routes, promote service to secondary cities, and feed hubs.
In Australia, for example, more than 120 jets older than 15 years of age serve the operating segment covering up to 150 seats. In fact, the first generation E190 has experienced a renaissance in the country as operators continue to seek near-term replacements for end-of-life Fokker 70/100s, BAe 146s, and Boeing 717s.
In Japan, Embraer believes the country’s changing demographics and aging fleet of large turboprops, regional jets, and narrowbodies will create the opportunity for airlines to meet the dual objectives of fleet modernization and matching capacity with diminished future demand. Within two years, more than 30 turboprops and regional jets will reach at least 15 years of age in the country, where E-Jets also stand to address downgauging away from Boeing and Airbus narrowbodies.
In high-growth markets such as Vietnam, Indonesia, and India, airline fleet decisions traditionally have favored the narrowbody types carrying more than 200 seats. While such an environment appears to cut against the value of E-Jets, Embraer insists the evolving fleet mix in those regions has created an acute capacity gap between the 70-seat turboprops and large narrowbodies ideally filled by E195-E2s.
Embraer also cites a drop in total traffic in and out of Jakarta, Bangkok, Singapore, Manila, and Kuala Lumpur by 5 percent since 2017 as airlines look to establish new direct routes between secondary and tertiary cities, again favoring smaller narrowbodies.
That trend could also bode well for ATR, which became the only Western manufacturer producing new passenger aircraft in the 30- to 70-seat capacity segment when De Havilland of Canada halted production of the Dash 8-400 in 2022. Now counting more than 500 of the aircraft in service in the region, the European company has dominated the Asia-Pacific market for decades. According to the company, turboprops flying routes shorter than 500 km account for 41 percent of the region's flights, leaving ATR in an ideal position to further exploit its near-monopoly in the sector.
During September’s inaugural Gyeongbuk Aerospace, Defence and Logistics Exhibition in Gumi in South Korea, ATR highlighted that country’s potential for ATR 72 proliferation, targeting deliveries of between 25 and 30 of the turboprops to Korean operators within seven years.
“Korea has many under-utilized domestic airports, and scheduled domestic flights are mainly north-south,” explained ATR head of commercial for Asia-Pacific Jean-Pierre Clercin. “ATR sees an opportunity to&nbsp;develop east-west routes, linking communities living along the east coast to places in Korea’s western part, and the ATR is the ideal platform to create these links, in terms of considering the passenger volume, the geography and the distance.”
Some of those same considerations also apply to India, where turboprops played an important role in gradually redeploying capacity amid the market’s recovery from Covid as airlines placed ATRs on routes previously served with single-aisle jets. Of the roughly 800 passenger aircraft in operation in the country, ATRs account for 66, flown by Alliance Air and Indigo.
The fastest-growing air transport market in the world, India has seen its commercial fleet double in size over the past 10 years. Meanwhile, the ATR fleet increased by 120 percent and the number of domestic routes has nearly tripled.
India—along with China, Japan, and Indonesia—already ranks among the top 15 largest passenger markets in the world, and IATA’s Goh pointed to Thailand and Vietnam as countries in the region that show the most potential to join that list. But if any obvious barriers exist to the growth of those and other developing markets, infrastructure stands among the most prominent.
“Although we are seeing expansion plans being proposed at some airports, these are not moving forward as quickly as we would like,” said Goh. “We would like to see governments and airports across the region adopt integrated and inclusive infrastructure planning, based on the best practices established in the IATA Airport Consultative Committee approach.”
Goh also called for more cooperation between bureaucracies responsible for airport development and the airlines. “It is important to engage airlines when it comes to new airport capacity,” he explained. “There is a general lack of transparency, which makes forward planning for airlines difficult. This is compounded when additional capacity is not delivered on time.”
Meanwhile, the development of air traffic management (ATM) infrastructure has not progressed as quickly or to the extent the air transport industry needs, he added.
“We are concerned about the development of ATM infrastructure in the region, which is failing to keep up with the pace of demand,” said Goh. “Many states consistently fail to consult with airspace users about the industry’s needs and continue to think and plan within their own borders only, rather than adopting a systemwide or regional viewpoint.”&nbsp;

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