Nyi Nyi ®
KONEMOE, Myanmar — Htay Aung was riding on a motorbike last Christmas morning through the cool hills of eastern Myanmar, when Air Bagan Flight 11 came down on top of him.
The Fokker 100 — more than 25 tons of aircraft, plus 65 passengers and six crew — sheared through trees and power lines, across the road and into a field short of nearby Heho Airport. Htay Aung found himself sucked into a scorching maelstrom of debris.
“I felt my body go up into the air and then drop. Fire was all around me,” recalled Mr. Htay Aung, who is now 19 and lives with the effects of burns across his head and body. His uncle, who was driving the motorbike, was killed.
The crash, which gutted the jet, killed one passenger and injured eight, most of them foreign tourists, capped a horrific year for air safety in Myanmar. In the country’s tiny fleet of domestic commercial aircraft, four were involved in serious accidents in 2012, one of them causing death.
But the appalling safety rate has hardly dented a broader trend in Myanmar’s aviation industry: spectacular growth. After decades under the thumb of generals, one of Asia’s last frontiers of commercial aviation is opening up.
Passenger numbers are surging as new airlines spring up and foreign carriers rush in. Some officials and executives talk of turning Myanmar into a regional hub.
The country, however, appears ill-prepared for the pace of change, putting both safety and the prospects of many hopeful airlines at risk.
“They’ve opened up, in my personal opinion, far before they’re ready for it,” said Shukor Yusof, an analyst who specializes in the aviation sector for the credit ratings agency Standard & Poor’s in Singapore.
“The infrastructure is not there to cope with demand. There’s going to be a point where it’s going to get choked up,” he said, adding that safety was “not going to improve any time soon.”
In the 2011-12 peak winter season for foreign tourists, who are driving much of the growth, there were 50,000 seats per week in and out of Myanmar provided by 13 international airlines, including the flag carrier Myanmar Airways International, or MAI, according to CAPA-Center for Aviation, a global aerospace consulting firm, and the flight industry database Innovata.
Last year, that jumped to 80,000 seats, with CAPA predicting that it would exceed 100,000 this winter. The number of international airlines in the country nearly doubled to 23 as of early October, with MAI and Golden Myanmar the only locals.
There are signs that too many airlines are entering at once, meaning the
number could shrink in coming years as some carriers merge or die off,
said Brendan Sobie, the chief analyst for Southeast Asia at CAPA.
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As Myanmar’s skies get busier, so are its antiquated and underfunded airports. Only three of Myanmar’s 33 airports — Yangon, Mandalay and Naypyidaw — are international. Others often lack bigger runways, advanced navigation and safety equipment and adequate security.
Yangon Airport, the country’s busiest, is already over its annual capacity of 2.7 million passengers, having accepted 3.1 million last year.