In the Blue Yonder

Ghazala Wahab

Statistics are like a pond full of fish. You choose the ones you de­sire. And if you don’t find the one you like, you can always add the spices while cooking it to suit your palate. That’s the good thing about data. It can be used to induce optimism as well as despair.

Boeing chose optimism in its annual press conference to share its commer­cial market outlook (CMO) for India on February 6, four days before Aero India. Its optimism was built on the founda­tion of three presumptions about the Indian economy: four times growth in the GDP by 2050; rising disposable in­come; and increase in jobs in the manu­facturing sector. Based on these, Boeing assessed that by 2031, India will be the third largest economy in the world. Giv­en that even today, the aviation sector contributes USD 54 billion to the econ­omy and has created 7.7 million jobs, it is only natural that as the economy ex­pands, this sector will grow too.

Hence, by 2043, the South Asian re­gion, led by India by a vast margin, would have the requirement of 2,835 aircraft, most of them single aisle. This will lead to the demand for nearly 129,000 pilots, technicians and cabin crew. The Boeing market analysts com­bined numbers with aspirational senti­ments of India’s growing middle class, comprising a huge youth population to arrive at this conclusion. Accord