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By Charles Alcock
July 10, 2026, © Leeham News: A combination of airlines’ desire to expand their networks with longer, thinner routes connecting smaller cities and a growing need to replace aging aircraft were key factors behind rising demand identified in the latest Global Market Forecast (GMF) released by Airbus on July 8. Between 2026 and 2045, the European airframer is now predicting 42,060 new passenger airliner deliveries in response to a projected two-fold increase in revenue passenger kilometers to 21.3 trillion.
Notably, this year’s 20-year forecast for global aircraft demand represents a slightly lower estimate than the one provided in Airbus’ forecast last year, which predicted 43,400 new passenger and freighter aircraft deliveries from 2025 to 2044.
Presenting this year’s GMF update to reporters in London, Antonio da Costa, Airbus’ vice president for market analysis and forecast, highlighted flight demand foundations such as rising personal wealth in Asia, Africa and Latin America. He pointed to anticipated growth in yearly flights per capita in countries including Nigeria, Egypt, India, South Africa, Brazil, Indonesia, Colombia, China and South Korea.
Part of this demand curve comes from people living and working outside their home country to make trips home to visit friends and relatives. This trend, Da Costa explained, is partly responsible for the expansion of direct air services between smaller cities, allowing passengers to avoid connections in mega hubs.
n A220 bound for Air Niugini, Papua New Guinea’s national carrier, on Airbus’ final assembly line in Mirabel, Quebec. Credit: Airbus
In 2025, according to Airbus, 55% of all city pairs were new routes that had not existed 20 years earlier. Da Costa pointed to an additional 532 airports with scheduled airline services that had not been on the global route network in 2005, pointing to such examples as Sucre in Brazil, Daocheng in China, and the Vietnamese resort destination of Thanh Hoa.
For Airbus, these GMF data points were part of its sales pitch on the route-launching potential for its newest narrowbody offering, the A220, which could potentially unlock more than 400 new thin routes in North America, Europe and Africa. The manufacturer also maintained that airlines have been eager to exploit significant range increases for the A350 (+1,900 nm), A330 (+3,000 nm), A321 (+2,500 nm), and A220 (+600 nm) families to add longer routes to networks.
Beyond these market trends, however, Airbus sees an increasingly urgent need to replace aging aircraft with a higher proportion (47%) of the projected new deliveries through 2045 expected to fill this role. Those deliveries will include 15,580 single-aisle airliners and 4,240 widebodies. According to Airbus’ analysis, as of 2025, just 53% of the global airliner fleet were less than 10 years old, compared with 63% in 2015. The proportion of in-service jets aged between 11 and 20 years increased over the same period from 29% to 35%.
Airbus commercial marketing vice president Joost van der Heijden said that the air transport sector has demonstrated strong resilience in the face of overlapping geopolitical challenges including the ongoing conflicts between Russia and Ukraine, and between the U.S. and Israel and Iran. The new GMF anticipates traffic growth of 2.1% this year, despite the unplanned dip in flights suffered by Middle Eastern carriers since February.
“The lessons learned from these challenges include airlines working to diversify their sources of fuel, their ability to use different routes to maintain connectivity,” van der Heijden said. “In fact, it has also reinforced the desire to replace older fleets [with more fuel-efficient aircraft].”
Boeing is set to release its own market forecast late next week as the aviation industry gears up for the Farnborough air show.
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