The Chinese government has launched an ambitious plan to build 97 regional airports by 2020 at an estimated cost of $62.5bn in an attempt to meet soaring domestic passenger and cargo demand.

The cabinet has approved the plan in recent days, stipulating that 45 of the new airports are to be finished by the end of 2010.

By the end of 2006, China had 147 civilian airports.

A decade of rapid econ­omic growth has created serious bottlenecks in aviation infrastructure, forcing the government to embark on a substantial building programme.

But analysts said chronic congestion will linger even with the addition of new airports, because of shortages in skilled personnel.

Elizabeth Bosher, Asia-Pacific managing director at Landrum & Brown, which provides consulting services to Chinese airports, said: "You can build the airports and buy the planes but you still need the people to maintain and repair them. There is so much expansion going on across the country that training will be top priority for at least the next 10 years."

The General Administration of Civil Aviation of China (CAAC) said the ob­jective was for 82 per cent of the country's 1.3bn people to live within 100km or 90 minutes' drive from an airport, up from the current 61 per cent.

But analysts also questioned whether building numerous small airports in more remote areas was the best way to improve efficiency in the industry.

Airports in China are usually built by provincial governments hoping to boost their local economies. There have been numerous examples in recent years of small airports closing down soon after they have been built because of lack of demand or poor co-ordination with regional neighbours.

According to CAAC the biggest problems facing the civil aviation industry include too few airports, limited services, saturation at the main hubs of Shanghai, Guangzhou and Beijing and difficulties in co-ordinating civil and military flight paths.

These problems are expected to worsen with domestic Chinese cargo traffic projected to increase 15 per cent annually between now and 2020, while passenger traffic should increase at an annual rate of 11.4 per cent.

That growth in passenger demand would raise the number of airports servicing more than 30m passengers a year from three to 13 by 2020, according to official figures.

The US, with less than a quarter of China's pop­ulation but a much higher gross domestic product per capita, had 3,364 airports by the end of 2005, according to the Airports Council Inter­national.