Rank: 1st, revenues $2-6 billion Sales (12 months through March 2012): $5.8 billion

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Transaero adds SSJ 100s and A380s; Sky Aviation puts Superjet deliveries on hold.

Can we believe in the reliability of long-term airline traffic forecasts? Should we trust economists and industry experts who tell us how many commercial transports will be needed by 2050 to handle an impressive number of travelers? Will the world's airlines carry more than 10 billion passengers annually less than 40 years from now? And does it even make sense to try to predict how big the airline industry could be in 2150?

This month, the citizens of Munich made a decision that sent Germany's air transport industry into a state of shock. In a local referendum, a majority of voters opted against the construction of a third runway at Munich Airport. Legally, the vote is only binding for one year, but Munich's mayor has already stated that the he considers it's a long-term decision. A new runway in Munich is now on the back burner, if it ever happens at all.

That Ryanair's CEO has a way of showing his contempt for regulators is no longer news in Europe, so it is perhaps par for the course that the carrier is launching a takeover attempt of Aer Lingus just as overseers look into whether the existing shareholding relationship is problematic. Nevertheless, the move creates renewed uncertainty about the future of Aer Lingus and its shareholding structure, as the airline is hoping to ride the structural changes it has made in recent years into a more profitable future.

Although Central and Eastern Europe are experiencing faster growth than any other part of the continent, many of the region's airlines are still old-school national carriers. Now many of them are trying to find a new model.

Every day, hundreds of aircraft traverse the world's busiest oceanic airspace over the North Atlantic, spending most of their journey out of range of existing surveillance technology. A planned global satellite-based service could change that, bringing the advantages of air traffic control to this vital corridor as well as to other areas lacking surveillance coverage.