A closer look at the Airbus Global Market Forecast 2017-2036

Every year Airbus releases its Global Market Forecast (GMF) for the overall demand for air travel, for traffic flows and ultimately the demand for aircraft of different capacities above 100 seats.

We are often asked how the numbers are calcualted. Well, there is a large team of experts in Toulouse who study many influencing factors. Whilst GDP remains an important driver for air transport, it is clearly not the only factor that drives growth. In fact, the team uses many different variables to forecast traffic flows such as total population, urban population, industrial production index, private consumption, imports and exports, employment, nominal change in inventory and government consumption to name just a few.

Other drivers that define where and how air travel will develop are factors such as the evolution of airline business models, liberalisation and tourism development. As well as growth on existing routes, positive political activity between states can also lead to growth, due to the fact that organic growth has been constrained.

One recent examples is Cuba where improving geo-politics has allowed for enhanced air links with 10 US-based airlines starting operations in 2016, and more than 300,000 monthly seats offered today, twice that offered in 2008. Market dynamics will continue to evolve as airlines match capacity to demand, infrastructure for visitors to the island develop and as geo-politics in the region evolves further.

As a result of this detailed analysis, Airbus forcasts a demand for 34,900 new aircraft by 2036, worth a total of US$5.3 trillion. This is equivalent to a doubling of the commercial fleet that will also see a need for 530,000 new pilots and 550,000 new maintenance engineers, and provides Airbus’ global services business a catalyst to grow. In order to accommodate this growth Airbus has more than tripled its global network of training locations in three years, incuding the recently opened training center in Brazil.

With approximately 40 percent of passenger aircraft demand needed for replacement and 60 percent for growth, the industry is set to continue its remarkable growth rate, not least in the dynamic Latin American market. If you want to know more why not go to airbus.com to download GMF material incuding the forecast book, or better still also download our new smartphone app by going to Apple and Google play stores and searching on Airbus GMF.

For more information please contact: 
Paul Moultrie
Head of Marketing Latin America & Caribbean
paul.moultrie@airbus.com