Busy skies, long lines at airport mean good news for Boeing

Long lines at the airport are only going to get longer as millions of new passengers take to the skies over the next 20 years. Boeing is out with its latest market forecast, and demand for more airplanes continues to skyrocket.

Nearly 37,000 new airplanes are going to be needed to fuel that demand over the next two decades; 4 percent more new airplanes than Boeing projected just last year.

“This year about 3 billion people will travel by air,” says Randy Tinseth, Vice President of marketing for Boeing Commercial Airplanes. “At the end of the forecast period in 2033, that number will grow to close to 7 billion passengers.”

Where will all of those passengers be coming from?

Tinseth says emerging markets like the Asia-Pacific and the Middle East are driving the demand with China being the major force. “China is approximately 40 percent of the units in Asia Pacific,” he says.

Tinseth says the demand in China is so high that by 2033, 48 percent of all air traffic will be going to or coming from that country.

“Today the China domestic market, I want to say, is 40 percent the size of the U.S. market, but by 2033 we actually expect that market to be bigger than the U.S. market,” he says.

Most of the new planes will be smaller, single-aisle planes like the 737NG and 737MAX. Boeing projects airlines will continue to move away from large, super-jumbos and toward more fuel-efficient wide-bodies like the 787 and 777.

While this 20-year forecast doesn’t project who will build the new planes, Tinseth believes Boeing is sitting-pretty.

“We’ve made decisions over the last few years to enhance and expand our product line and we believe we’re well positioned to capture the growth and replacement demand over the next 20 years,” he says.

The value of the new airplanes Boeing forecasts will be needed over that time is over $5 trillion.