According to a news report, the Asia-Pacific region will see airline passenger traffic doubling over the next 15 years, growing more quickly than the rest of the world at a rate of nearly five percent a year.
The Geneva-based Air Transport Action Group (ATAG), a coalition of all branches of the industry, also forecast that the fastest growth in the region would be scored by its two liberalising communist-ruled countries, Vietnam and China.
ATAG said in its annual report that by the year 2014, there will be 871 million people travelling by air to, from and within the region, more than twice the number recorded in 1999.
The region includes East and Southeast Asia and Australia but not Latin America and its share of the world total of passengers on international scheduled routes would climb to 36 percent from 32.5 percent at the turn of the century.
That jump, ATAG said, would come primarily as a result of the expansion of trade -- which analysts at global economic bodies expect to jump sharply when China enters the World Trade Organisation, probably within the next year.