Wednesday saw a senior Boeing executive informing that Boeing Co, the renowned aircraft maker, is expecting orders from Chinese airlines to account for nearly 40% of its forecast of 8,960 commercial jet orders from Asia over the next 20 years.

On the sidelines of the Asian Aerospace conference, Randy Tinseth, Boeing's vice president of marketing for its commercial aircraft division, expressed the hope that China's domestic passenger market would expand more rapidly than any other market, at 8.6% annually, between 2009 and 2028.

The Chicago-based company, by contrast, expects the North American market to increase by just 2.5% a year, and the intra-Europe market to rise 3.4% annually - as measured in revenue passenger kilometers, a major metric for gauging passenger revenue.

An annual growth of 6.9% was forecast for the Asia-Pacific region as a whole, by Boeing, which also specified that most probably the region will take-over North America as the world's largest air travel market in less than 10 years.

Due to the recent economic meltdown, some airlines have been forced to defer deliveries of new aircraft. Boeing recorded 100 deferrals, for the year 2008, mostly from North American customers.

(via TopNews United Kingdom. Contributed by Sunil Kumar)