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.
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.
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