By John Heffernan Business Correspondent, Daily Post
THE figure for airline passenger journeys this year will top 2bn, equal to a quarter of the world's population. And the rise of China and India ensures that this global growth in airline traffic will continue.
Both of these countries are expected to have doubled their share of the world's GDP in 10 year's time. By then they will have economies bigger than those of the UK, France and Germany combined.
Thus these Asian/Pacific countries will be where our future markets lie. And airports will be the gateway to get to them.
The UK's appetite for air travel, growing at twice the rate of UK GDP, is seen by many as the economic justification for increased UK investment in regional airports reflected in news such as the plans for further expansion at Liverpool John Lennon Airport (JLA), now handling five times as many passengers a year as it was in 1998.
Until now Liverpool has concentrated on the short-haul European market but from next year will offer flights to New York. Its future expansion plans could include a longer runway, opening up the possibility of long haul fights to other parts of the world.
If the explosion in air traffic does continue, then JLA could be well placed to take full advantage. But can you trust the figures?
However careful the experts are, their estimates about future demand has to be based on past trends (extrapolation) and that can result in wildly inaccurate conclusions. Look how wrong the experts were about Eurotunnel's likely passenger figures.
One of the assumptions built into the estimates about future airline passenger traffic is that air fares will continue to fall in real (inflation-adjusted) terms by 1% a year as they have done for year past as planes got bigger.
Oddly enough, that is exactly what happened to electricity prices pre-World War II as power stations then got bigger. But that doesn't happen now does it?
Emission cost are soaring making electricity dearer year by year. And one day the EU says it will bring the airline industry to book on this subject of emissions (2008 is its pious hope for airline carbon trading to start but I bet it will not happen before 2012 at earliest).
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