Boeing on Wednesday raised by 15 per cent its forecast for Indian commercial plane purchases, saying growing affluence will prompt more middle-class Indians to take to the skies.
Over the next two decades, Indian airline companies could buy up to 1,150 planes, spending $130 billion, Boeing, the world's largest aerospace company, said.
The Chicago-based company had earlier forecast that India would spend $100 billion to purchase 1,000 planes by 2030.
"There is strength and resilience in the India commercial aviation sector over the long term," said Dinesh Keskar, president of the Indian arm of Boeing, the world's largest aerospace company.
India's "potential for future growth of air travel, both domestically and internationally, is among the greatest in the world," Keskar said in an emailed statement.
A Boeing executive said the raised forecast was linked to an increasingly strong outlook for India's long-term economic growth and a fast expanding middle class in the country of 1.2 billion people.
"The key driver has been how India's GDP has been shaping up and what is the potential going forward for growth," the executive said.
The government projects India's economy will grow by 8.5 per cent in 2010 and could reach double-digits by 2013.
Cheaper airline fares as the aviation sector liberalised created a massive migration from India's congested trains to planes that revolutionised travel.
But that shift lost pace with the global financial crisis which sent India's fiercely competitive airline industry into a tailspin.
Passenger numbers began rebounding toward the second half of 2009 as economic growth picked up and Keskar forecast air travel in India should largely recover by 2011.
"We went through the deepest recession in the history of aviation but now India's recovery is one of the fastest," Keskar said.
"We believe there will be a record 50 million passengers this year if the trend continues," he added.
India's nine carriers flew a record 44 million passengers in the financial year that ended March 31.
Keskar added that India would become one of the "significant leasing markets" with a large chunk of planes being taken by Indian carriers on lease.
Some two-thirds of the Indian aviation market is now served by no-frill carriers like IndiGo, SpiceJet, JetLite, JetKonnect and Kingfisher Re and this trend will continue over the next two decades, Keskar said.
South Asia, including India, is expected to have the fastest airline traffic growth in the world, increasing by 8.9 per cent annually, Keskar said, outpacing China's 7.6 per cent and far outdistancing North America's 3.4 per cent.
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