African aviation growth accelerating – Boeing
19 November 2012
Creamer Media's Engineering News - US aerospace group Boeing has reported that the rate of growth in airline traffic in Africa has been better than it forecast last year."There's growth in demand, growth in point-to-point [traffic] in passengers," Boeing VP sales (Africa, Latin America and the Caribbean) Van Rex Gallard told journalists in Sandton, north of Johannesburg, on Monday.
"Africa is modernising, Africa is bringing in a new fleet of airplanes, which are safer and more efficient," he stated. "This is building the sustainable growth we need."
"The size of the markets will grow, so the size of the aircraft will grow, but mainly in the single-aisle category," he said. (Airliners can be divided into regional, single-aisle, twin-aisle or wide body, and very large categories.)
Gallard opined that, in Africa, demand for regional airliners (which carry less than 100 passengers) would decline whereas demand for single-aisle airliners, such as the Boeing 737, would increase. There would be a slight increase in demand for twin-aisle airliners while demand for very large airliners would remain stable.
Category: Transport