Chinese airlines, increasingly important players in global demand for commercial aircraft, should return to their customary powerful rates of expansion in the coming year, despite the strange collapse in traffic growth they have suffered in the past few months. A remarkable combination of events has waylaid industry growth, bringing it down from its usual thundering rate of around 15% a year. Passenger numbers in the first five months of the year were only 7.3% higher than a year earlier.

China Southern’s latest traffic data confirm weakening demand growth in the Chinese aviation industry. The airline carried 3.3% fewer passengers in June than a year earlier. Passenger numbers for the first half of the year are up just 5.7%, a far cry from the local industry’s typical growth rates of 15% or more in the past few years. Chinese aviation demand has been diminished by the Sichuan earthquake in May as well as price rises offsetting rising fuel prices.

Aiming to broaden and deepen its aerospace expertise, South Korea is planning to develop a regional jet airliner, a very light private jet and an all-composite light propeller aircraft. The proposal for a 60-seat regional jet revives the country’s long-standing ambition to take a major role in developing and building a commercial aircraft, an ambition that dates back to the K100, a 93-123-seat aircraft that was proposed for codevelopment with China in the mid-1990s. It would also strengthen the trend for new aircraft programs appearing in Asia.