I was reading Richard Brubaker’s post at All Roads Lead to China about how China’s infratstructure is currently maxed out:

With regard to the recent air capacity issues, this is a situation that was horrible 18 months ago. Planes were consistently 1-2 hours delayed, lines were long, and even getting a cab from the airport seemed to take a half day (unless you took the gypsy cabs). A large part of this was the number of airplanes available for commercial airliners, and the fact that any weather delays forced the system to a halt as new lanes could not be made available.

Which made me think about how China is going to be able to cope in the future for air travel similar to the US today. The US already has to monitor its airspace extremely well and has its own problems of delays (part of that is the hub system in my opinion), so just how will China be able to really deal with its airspace?

Consider this: China’s population is about 4 times that of the US, living predominantly on one side of the country. When China does reach the level of prosperity of the US (and assuming there is not some kind of of teleportation technology at that point in time), it will likely have a very tough time trying to cope with the numbers of people traveling by air.

Still, China has been dealing with a large population for a long time now and will undoubtfully find a way out of that problem.