Airbus has released its Global Market Forecast for 2026 to 2045, and the regional numbers are striking. Asia-Pacific alone will need 19,120 new passenger aircraft over the next two decades, 45% of total global demand, with passenger traffic growing at a 5.1% annual rate against a 3.9% global average. Globally, Airbus is forecasting 42,060 new aircraft in total, so the region is carrying almost half the world’s growth on its own.
Roughly two-thirds of that 19,120 figure is genuine fleet expansion, with the rest replacing older aircraft. Split by type, it’s 15,700 single-aisle jets in the 100 to 244 seat range and 3,420 widebodies, which on its own accounts for almost half of worldwide widebody demand. That’s a lot of metal heading into the skies above our part of the world.
What’s more interesting than the headline number, though, is where Airbus expects it to fly. The forecast leans heavily on a decentralisation thesis: airlines moving beyond the traditional hub-and-spoke model to connect secondary cities directly, using aircraft like the A321XLR and A220 to make thinner routes commercially viable. City pairs have grown from 17,000 in 2005 to 28,000 in 2025, and Airbus says 78% of today’s routes involve smaller cities rather than major hubs. Tellingly, the airline names Melbourne to Alice Springs as exactly the kind of route this new generation of aircraft is opening up, in the same breath as Dublin to Nashville and Taipei to Phoenix.
That’s a useful example, but it also shows the limits of what scheduled aviation will ever cover. Airbus is talking about routes that clear a commercial density threshold. Most of regional and resource-sector Australia doesn’t, and won’t, however many A220s or A321XLRs enter service globally. A mining site in the Pilbara, a FIFO roster into the Territory, or a medical evacuation from a remote strip was never going to show up on an airline’s route map, no matter how the aircraft mix shifts over the next twenty years. That’s the gap charter exists to fill, and it’s not going anywhere.
It’s also worth remembering that 19,120 aircraft arriving “by 2045” doesn’t mean 2045 problems get solved this decade. A third of that total is simply replacing aircraft already flying, so net new capacity builds more slowly than the headline suggests. For businesses and travellers who need reliable access to regional Australia now, rather than sometime in the 2030s, that gap is the whole point of chartering rather than waiting on a scheduled seat.
Adagold Aviation has spent 30 years managing exactly this kind of access, from FIFO and mining charter flights into remote sites to private jet hire for business and leisure travel across the country’s regional and outback destinations. If your route isn’t one an airline will ever schedule, our charter flight specialists can help you find an aircraft that gets you there anyway.
