*Qatar Airways among the top five airlines ranked by scheduled freight tonne kilometres flown

The Middle East region has seen a record 216.1mn passengers in 2017, which accounts for 5.3% of the global market share, the International Air Transport Association (IATA) said on Thursday. 
This represents an increase of 4.6% on 2016, IATA said in its ‘World Air Transport Statistics’. 
Worldwide annual air passenger numbers exceeded 4bn for the first time, supported by a broad-based improvement in global economic conditions and lower average airfares. 
At the same time, IATA noted that airlines connected a record number of cities worldwide, providing regular services to over 20,000 city pairs in 2017, more than double the level of 1995. 
“Such increases in direct services improve the industry’s efficiency by cutting costs and saving time for both travellers and shippers alike,” IATA said. 
This information is included in the recently released 62nd Edition of the World Air Transport Statistics (WATS), the yearbook of the airline industry’s performance.
Globally, cargo markets showed a 9.9% expansion in freight and mail tonne kilometres (FTKs). This outstripped a capacity increase of 5.3% increasing freight load factor by 2.1%.
The report showed that Qatar Airways (11bn) is among the top five airlines ranked by scheduled freight tonne kilometres flown.
The top three airlines ranked by total scheduled passenger kilometres flown, were American Airlines (324mn), Delta Air Lines (316.3mn) and United Airlines (311mn).
IATA said the top five international/regional passenger airport-pairs were all within the Asia-Pacific region, again this year: Hong Kong-Taipei Taoyuan (5.4mn, up 1.8% from 2016); Jakarta Soekarno-Hatta-Singapore (3.3mn, +0.8%); Bangkok Suvarnabhumi-Hong Kong (3.1mn, + 3.5%); Kuala Lumpur-Singapore (2.8mn, down 0.3%) and Hong Kong-Seoul Incheon (2.7mn, -2.2%).
The top five domestic passenger airport-pairs were also all in the Asia-Pacific region: Jeju-Seoul Gimpo (13.5mn, up 14.8% over 2016); Melbourne Tullamarine-Sydney (7.8mn +0.4%); Fukuoka-Tokyo Haneda (7.6mn, +6.1%); Sapporo-Tokyo Haneda (7.4mn, +4.6%), and Beijing Capital-Shanghai Hongqiao (6.4mn, +1.9%).
One of the interesting recent additions to the WATS report is the ranking of passenger traffic by nationality, for international and domestic travel. (Nationality refers to the passenger’s citizenship as opposed to the country of residence.)
The top five were the US (632mn, representing 18.6% of all passengers); China (555mn, 16.3%); India (161.5mn, 4.7%), UK (147mn, 4.3%) and Germany (114.4mn, 3.4%).
Star Alliance maintained its position as the largest airline alliance in 2016 with 39% of total scheduled traffic (in RPKs), followed by SkyTeam (33%) and oneworld (28%), said IATA, which represents some 290 airlines comprising 82% of global air traffic.