Originally posted by Gixer
Any bets on how long it will take China Airlines to surpass Singapore and be the worlds biggest?
Probably a very long time. The world's largest airline, American Airlines, carries more than 88m passengers annually. China actually has five major airlines, and the largest of these, China Southern, carries about 15m passengers a year and has a fleet of about 200 aircraft. This compares with about 90 aircraft in the Singpore Airlines (SIA) fleet, so China Southern is already bigger than SIA.
The geography and demographics of the different countries operating these airlines is vastly different, and this is reflected in the airlines they operate. For example, although American Airlines is the largest airline in the world, it does not operate any 747s, and the most crucial aircraft in its fleet is probably the MD80 with about 130 seats. Compare that with SIA, whose
smallest aircraft is the A340-500, configured to long range and a seating capacity of 181. The
only other aircraft they operate are 747-400, and several variants of 777. SIA is going flat out with A380 orders, and yet Singapore is a small country less than one sixth of the size of Rhode Island - America's smallest state - and with a population of only about 4m.
China has what - ¼ of the world's population? It's about 1.4bn. I wonder how many of them will ever fly. The proportion of car ownership, if that's anything to go by, is only one per 300,000 people.
