"China has become a major attraction for international airlines," Giovanni Bisignani, director general of the International Air Transport Association (IATA), told journalists.

"IATA forecasts that air passenger traffic in China will grow by 9.6 percent annually until 2009 and freight traffic will increase by 14.4 percent."

Bisignani was in Beijing to urge Chinese air authorities to better implement IATA auditing methods, open up wider its skies to civilian air traffic and establish more international air corridors into China.

He said he would also become the first IATA director to visit North Korea when he flies to Pyongyang on Tuesday.

"I will remind North Korea of the importance of international standards, discuss overflight routes and talk about helping build civil aviation," he said.

Bisignani said China's explosive growth in air travel needed to be accompanied by similar growth in infrastructure such as airports and air routes.

The international air industry would also benefit from more transparency in the pricing of China's airport costs, which are among the world's highest, he said.

Chinese airlines carried 74.25 million passengers in the first half of 2006, up 17.9 percent from the same period a year earlier, while air cargo traffic increased 11.4 percent to 1.56 million tons, state press reports have said.

Despite the increased air traffic, Chinese airlines suffered losses totaling more than 3.0 billion yuan (375 million dollars) in the first six months of the year, partly due to world fuel price rises.

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