Central Asia overtook South Asia last year to become the fastest-growing aviation sub-region in the world, carrying roughly 60mn passengers in 2025 — a milestone that set the tone for a panel discussion on the sector's prospects at the fifth annual Tashkent International Investment Forum (TIIF 2026), where speakers spent less time debating whether the demand exists than discussing how badly it has already been underestimated.

"We were wrong. We massively underestimated," said Kazbek Bassiev of Vision Invest, the developer building the new Tashkent airport, recalling forecasts made when his firm entered the market two and a half years ago. Bankers and advisors at the time predicted Tashkent airport would handle 11mn passengers annually by 2030. It hit 10mn in 2025 — four years ahead of schedule. The new airport Vision Invest is building will open with 20mn passengers of capacity, double current throughput, with plans to expand toward 50mn within three decades, and possibly start to rival Turkey’s Istanbul Airport as a regional transport hub.

The scale of the opportunity, as moderator Suresh Subudhi of Boston Consulting Group framed it at the outset of the discussion, rests on several converging trends. Airline passenger growth is running at roughly 2.5 times the rate of GDP growth, partly driven by Uzbekistan’s emerging middle class. The number of airlines serving Uzbekistan has quadrupled in eight years to around 50. Foreign direct investment has risen tenfold over the same period, reaching approximately $40bn last year. And the country is, in aviation terms, still cheap relative to its own income levels in a way that points to substantial further growth: the average air ticket costs the equivalent of 25 days' wages in Uzbekistan, against four days in Kazakhstan and roughly one day in advanced economies. As incomes rise, that gap should compress — and demand should rise with it.

A hub strategy with genuine geography behind it

The most ambitious idea floated repeatedly across the panel was Tashkent's potential as an international transit hub, sitting at the crossing point of Europe, the Middle East and Asia – and part of the broader Middle Corridor ambitions to recreate the legendary Silk Road that connected Asia to Europe in the days of Marco Polo.

Transit traffic through Tashkent currently stands at under 7% of total passengers, against 40% to 70% at established hubs such as Dubai or Istanbul — a gap that represents either a major missed opportunity or, more optimistically, substantial untapped headroom.

Javlonbek Umarkhodjaev, chairman of Uzbekistan Airports, was blunt about what building a hub actually requires: "Foreign airlines never build hub airports in another territory."

A national carrier with scale, frequency and genuine network depth has to lead, with the airport infrastructure and a friendly regulatory regime built around it. Bum Ho Kim of Incheon International Airport Corporation drew a striking historical parallel, noting that Korea's economy in 1990 — population 43mn, GDP per capita of $6,000, and Incheon-predecessor traffic of around 12mn passengers — looked remarkably similar to Uzbekistan's profile today: 38mn people, roughly $4,000 GDP per capita, and 10mn passengers through Tashkent.

"It is a very perfect time to report as an aviation hub in Central Asia," he said, while flagging five risk categories that could derail the ambition: regulatory and policy gaps, workforce shortages, an ecosystem imbalance, digital and technology gaps, and supply chain or fleet delays. Of these, he identified regulatory consistency as the most pressing — specifically, that Tashkent's main airport remains excluded from the open skies liberalisation already extended to Uzbekistan's regional airports, a protection for the national carrier that simultaneously limits the broader market's growth.

The IPO story

Marius Dan, chief executive for Central Asia at Templeton Global Investments and head of Franklin Templeton's Uzbekistan asset management arm, used his appearance to preview what may be the sector's most consequential near-term event: the planned IPO of Uzbekistan Airways.

The airline is the largest single asset inside the Uzbekistan National Investment Fund (UzNIF), whose own London listing in May — achieved within a year of the fund's creation and requiring 17 changes to Uzbek law — Dan described as "nothing short of a miracle." The airline's IPO process is set to launch at the end of June or start of July with the selection of equity advisors, built around 125 separate transformation initiatives covering ancillary revenue, fleet expansion, loyalty programmes and cost discipline.

Omar Turk of BlackRock, drawing on the firm's experience as an infrastructure investor in airports including Gatwick, set out the conditions for a successful public-private partnership: aligned incentives and proper risk-sharing between public and private partners, sufficient operational control across the entire asset rather than a single piece of it, and genuine operating capability rather than capital alone. At Gatwick, he noted, that combination lifted hourly air traffic movements from 50 to 57, security throughput from 160 to over 500 passengers per hour, and total annual passengers from 33mn to 43mn — all while holding costs per passenger flat in real terms.

What still needs to happen

The panel's closing remarks converged on execution risk rather than demand risk. Bassiev flagged aircraft availability as the binding constraint, given multi-year lead times on new deliveries. Umarkhodjaev named qualified personnel as the single biggest gap of the next five years, citing new airport academies and a training partnership with Incheon. Boeing's Mario Antonio Ebcim urged planning across the whole ecosystem — pilots, technicians, ground crew — warning that "if you don't have that, the airplane is a waste."

Asked to bet on one outcome, Subudhi closed the session by naming the Uzbekistan Airways IPO as the development worth watching most closely.