After years of waiting for China to lift heavy restrictions on airspace, wealthy travellers and aircraft manufacturers have reason to celebrate — the country’s skies are opening up to private flights.

The makers of helicopters and small business jets are predicting a major bump in sales — France’s Dassault Falcon just moved its Asia office from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing, which it called the new “centre of gravity” for the market.

The private air travel industry “will be one of the fastest-growing sectors in the next 10 years”, Frank Lee, chairman of China Private Aviation Company, a consultancy offering aircraft acquisition and charter services, told AFP.

A new poll from SEI Wealth Network, a wealth-advisory firm, suggests that a majority of millionaires have signed up for social media sites. There is just one problem: They don’t have time to actually use them.

70% of respondents with $5 million or more in investible assets are users of Facebook and other social media sites. But the poll also showed that only 17% of the multimillionaires use the sites on a daily basis.

That is far less than the broader population, in which 38% use such sites at least once a day. The main reason: the wealthy are squeezed for time.

Hurun Research Institute has released the Hurun Rich List 2010, the twelfth annual ranking of the richest individuals in China.

The list names 1,363 individuals with a personal wealth of 1 billion yuan (US$150 million), up from 1,000 last year and just 24 a decade ago.

China – the world’s second largest economy – has the fastest growing wealthy population in the world, according to a report by Merrill Lynch and Capgemini.

65-year old Zong Qinghou of Wahaha is the richest man in China with a personal fortune of US$12 billion.

The ranks of Asia-Pacific millionaires are likely to continue growing faster than those from developed countries as regional economies led by China and India power ahead, a report said on Tuesday.

The study on high-net-worth individuals (HNWIs) — defined as anyone with investable assets of at least one million US dollars — was issued by Merrill Lynch Global Wealth Management and consultancy firm Capgemini.

“Moving forward, China and India will lead the way in the region with economic expansion and HNWI growth likely to keep outpacing more developed economies,” the Asia-Pacific Wealth Report said.

New York had 667,200 millionaires in 2009, a whopping 18.7% increase from the year before, according to a study released by the consulting firm Capgemini.

The French consulting firm, calculated the number of individuals with a net worth of over $1 million, excluding real estate, in the 10 largest metropolitan areas in the United States.

The results provide further indication that the nation’s wealthy have recovered more swiftly than the nation’s less-well-off.

For most people having a luxury jet to yourself is a dream that seems very out-of-reach. Not for multi-millionaire hotel heiress Paris Hilton.

Ms Hilton tweeted a picture of herself yesterday reclining on a bed on her private jet as she flew to Paris, France.

Hilton, was coming from London, about which she Tweeted: ‘I love this city! One of my favorite cities in the world.’