Global Demand For Air Travel Has Reached The 50% Level, And It Likely Won't Slow Up

No matter where you are in the world you can now turn to the person next to you and accurately assume that one of the two of year flew someplace last year – at least statistically speaking.

That’s because for the first time ever the number of airline passengers worldwide topped the 50% mark of the world’s entire population. The International Air Transport Association recently reported that 4.4 billion passengers took flight on commercial airlines in 2018. That’s a bit more than half of the global population.

Of course, if you’re standing in a remote village in Bangladesh, it’s pretty certain that most – maybe even none – of the native people in that village flew last year, or any time ever. And if you’re standing in certain locations in New York, Atlanta, Los Angeles, Chicago and hundreds of other big cities around the nation and around the world, it’s very likely that everyone near you flew multiple times in 2018 alone. So don’t be confused by IATA’s data showing that a number equal to half the world’s population flew last year. That doesn’t mean, literally, that half of the people alive on Earth flew at least once last year; just that the number of people who flew last year – including those who flew just once in the year and the guy who boarded 100 flights 2018 and therefore got counted as 100 passengers all by himself – was roughly equal to 50% of mankind.

Determining exactly how many people in any one country, let alone how many residents of the third planet from our Sun, actually boarded at least one commercial flight last year simply isn’t possible. Even more impossible is determining how many people on Earth have flown at least once in their lifetimes. That’s because no global database tracking who, specifically, has or has not flown exists. But there have been over time some interesting estimates that have been floated. In part that’s because humans are oddly curious  beings when it comes to wanting to know such details. And in part it’s because such a number actually would be helpful to the folks in the aircraft manufacturing, airline and airports, and global economic development industries.

Back in 2016 Air & Space took a stab at it.  The magazine’s editors, working from Bureau of Transportation Statistics data gathered in its 2003 Omnibus Household Survey, concluded that a third of all U.S. adults had taken at least one flight in the 12 months prior to the 2016 report’s release. Air & Space’s editors also relied on BTS’s estimate that only 18 percent of Americans in 2016 had never, ever flown, meaning 82% had.

Of course, that’s data from just one nation, which also happens to be the most economically advanced and advantaged nation in the world and one that historically has been the top performer in per capita travel and travel spending. So applying that 82% figure for the percentage of Americans who’d flown at least once to the entire world’s population would create an obviously ridiculous number like 7.2 billion people.

Why is that so ridiculous? Well, back in 2004 Credit Suisse First Boston researchers discovered that only 47% of survey respondents in just eight large Chinese cities had ever flown. To be sure, air travel has exploded across China and pretty much all of Asia since 2004. But as hugely populace as Chinese cities are – and as are most of Asia’s big cities – the majority of residents in China and throughout Asia still live in largely undeveloped rural area. A very high percentage of those people – and folks like them in other slower-developing parts of the world like Africa and South America likely still have never flown.

But even that’s not 100% true. Take Indonesia, for example. Because it is a nation made up of many, many islands, people traveling to visit friends or family, or conduct business within that nation always have had to rely on boats. But in the last 40 years, domestic airlines largely have replaced ferries as the principle means of inter-island transport because planes are faster and can lower the cost of such travel by making what once were week-long trips into simply day trips. Thus, even Indonesians of relatively modest means can and do fly at least a few times each year.

To be sure, the percentage of the global population who have flown at all, and who fly at least once in any 12-month period is growing. From data revealed in 2009’s Omnibus Household Survey, BTS concluded that 39.85% of all U.S. adults flew during the preceding 12 months. That same year the Gallup organization, based on its surveys, reported that 52% of American survey respondents had flown during the preceding 12 months.

Obviously, air travel demand has continued to grow since then, and we can reasonably assume that both the percentage of people on Earth who have flown at least once and the percent of those who have flown within the last 12 months have grown significantly.

That we can never know with absolute certainty those two numbers does not dilute the significance of last year’s milestone air traffic total equaling roughly half of the global population. That achievement makes it clear – if it wasn’t already – that air travel is becoming an ever-bigger factor in life on earth and, most importantly, an ever bigger factor in the global economy and the individual economies of most every nation.

That has huge implications for the future in terms of how local, regional and national governments spend money to support travel infrastructure like airports, runways, roads, hotels and the related technologies needed to support that. Failing to plan now to keep up with that relentless demand for travel globally could doom any one nation’s future economic status to second-, or lower-tier status. In turn that would keep more people in such nations well behind their rest of the world in terms of building national and individual wealth.

Curiously, at the same time that the data tell us that air travel continues to grow faster and bigger than ever – and faster and bigger than many other segments of local, regional, national and global economies – there are early rumblings of opposition to such growth based on environmental concerns. In parts of western Europe, for example, there’s a small, almost statistically insignificant, but culturally loud movement to reduce or avoid air travel as a way of reducing individual and collective carbon footprints. The movement has even included efforts to cast shame on those who don’t cut back or eliminate their air travels.

Obviously, such efforts are open to criticism that residents of relatively wealthier nations can now afford to cutback on air travel to ease their environmental consciences at a time when people from historically undeveloped nations are just beginning to access the economic development opportunities that air travel makes possible. But in this case, criticizing those who now want to limit air travel’s growth for environmental reasons may not be worth the effort. The attraction of air travel, especially among those who largely were unable to afford it for the first 90 years of commercial aviation, is so strong it is doubtful efforts at shaming those who do fly will be very successful in slowing air travel’s growth around the globe.

When half of the world’s population, at least statistically speaking, is already engaged in one activity, there’s not much chance that anyone will be able to slow, let alone halt, that the demand for more and more of it.