This is probably going to be no great surprise to anyone who's flown on an airline lately. More of us are flying, and on more flights.

The International Air Transport Association (IATA), which just held its annual "World Air Transport Summit" in Paris this week, recently came out with a report that international passenger traffic was up 5.9% in the first quarter of 2006, compared to the same period last year.

The report says passenger load factors averaged a little over 74% during the first quarter, which is close to matching capacity to demand.

The U.S. Department of Transportation also recently released a report on U.S. airline passenger traffic for 2005, both domestic and international. It says that U.S. airlines carried 4.6% more passengers in 2005 compared with 2004. U.S. airlines carried nearly 746 million passengers on their systems last year.

Some interesting findings from the U.S. DOT study:

• Passengers on U.S. airlines flew on 11 million flights in 2005, which is an increase of about 100,000 flights over 2004
• Revenue passenger miles were up 5.7%
• The passenger load factor was up 2.1 points
• Average nonstop distance flown per departure was up about 2%
• Average total passenger trip length was up about 1%

And certainly these findings from the U.S. DOT, as well as IATA, confirm the positive trends that Boeing is seeing in the market:

• People around the world rely on air travel for business, for visiting friends and relatives, and for leisure travel - air travel is an essential service
• Strong economic growth and liberalizing marketplaces are driving strong traffic growth around the world
• Traffic demand is exceeding capacity growth, pushing up load factors to historical highs

One interesting development to watch is in the U.S., where domestic capacity is actually forecast to shrink this year as many U.S. carriers move capacity to serve international markets. While in Europe and Asia growing airlines are taking advantage of new opportunities opened by liberalization - new nonstops, more frequencies, new business models.

The result is air travel is becoming available to more and more passengers. High growth markets such as China, India, and others, have announced multiple new air services agreements over the last year. And this just spurs the opening of more new routes.

Now, when I'm asked about these promising trends, I always have to throw in a bit of caution. While the current economic outlook is positive, we have to keep our eyes on some factors, such as continued high oil prices, geopolitical tensions, or a possible avian flu pandemic.

But over the last couple of years we've seen global economies show resilience in the face of tsunamis, hurricanes, and rising oil prices. So for now I'd say we should expect traffic growth to continue along the current trends reflected in these two reports.

And that's good news for our industry - and for travelers.