India will need 1,750 passenger & cargo aircraft over next 20 yrs: Report

India will require 1,750 new passenger and cargo aircraft over the next 20 years to meet an exponential rise in both passenger and freight traffic, according to Airbus' latest India Market Forecast.

To help meet this growth, India will need 1,320 new single-aisle aircraft and 430 wide-body aircraft valued at $255 billion.

The projections are based on a year-on-year growth in traffic serving the Indian market at 8.1 per cent in the next 20 years, almost twice as fast as the world average of 4.4 per cent.

"India is going to witness over five-fold growth in air traffic in the next 20 years while it would double globally every five years. Considering the infrastructure constraints, Delhi alone would require 70 daily flights of A380s, just based on the present scenario at UK's busiest airport Heathrow where 10 per cent of the daily traffic is being handled by A380s. That is going to be the potential demand for aircraft in India," Joost Van Der Heijden, head of marketing, Asia and North America at Airbus said on Friday.

India is set to become the world's third largest aviation market by 2019-20 and Airbus is well positioned to partner its growth with backlog orders of over 530 aircraft till date, claims the company. On an average, one Airbus aircraft will be delivered to India every week for next ten years.

According to Airbus India president (commercial aircraft) Srinivasa Dwarakanath, every model of aircraft being built by the company, including the Airbus A380 contains some component made in India. "In the last three years, our cumulative sourcing from India stood at $1.5 billion, which is not driven by offsets but a sustained business. As some of our partners here would reach the design and build capabilities in the near future Airbus will then have the complete ecosystem of manufacturing in India," Dwarakanath said.