Airbus Sees New Routes and Aging Fleets Driving Demand

Airbus identified a combination of airlines’ desire to expand their networks with longer, thinner routes connecting smaller cities and a growing need to replace aging aircraft as key factors behind rising demand in its latest Global Market Forecast (GMF) released on July 8. Between 2026 and 2045, the European airframer is now predicting 42,060 passenger airliner deliveries in response to a projected twofold increase in revenue passenger kilometers to 21.3 trillion.

Presenting this year’s GMF update to reporters in London, Antonio da Costa, Airbus’ v-p 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 such as 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 airline hubs.

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 were not on the global route network in 2005, including Sucre in Brazil, Daocheng in China, and the Vietnamese resort destination of Thanh Hoa.

For Airbus, these GMF data points were the cue for a sales pitch on the route-launching potential for its newest narrowbody offering, the A220, which it said has made more than 400 new thin routes viable in North America, Europe, and Africa. The aircraft 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-production deliveries through 2045 expected to be made for this reason. These will include 15,580 single-aisle airliners and 4,240 widebodies.

Aging Fleet Replacement More Urgent

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 v-pt Joost van der Heijden said that the air transport sector has demonstrated strong resilience despite overlapping geopolitical challenges such as the ongoing conflicts between Russia and Ukraine, and between the U.S./Israel and Iran. The GMF anticipates traffic growth of 2.1% this year, even with the dip in flights at Middle Eastern carriers since the war in Iran started in late 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].”