MONTREAL - 'SHALL we take the eight o'clock air train to Paris?' It may sound strange to say now, but such jargon is likely to become commonplace someday - if aviation futurists are right in their predictions.

This and other fantastic ideas are being conceived by experts at the International Civil Aviation Organisation (ICAO) tasked with imagining the future of air travel.

In the corridors of the UN agency's Montreal headquarters, they chat openly about air trains - a term coined to describe jetliners flying in formation, like fighter jets, from departure to destination.

For air traffic controllers it would mean having to follow a single object or cluster of jetliners in the sky, reducing their workload.

Another proposal dubbed 'tunneling' would require autopilots to guide aircraft through virtual tunnels in the sky, reducing the need for interaction between flight crew and air traffic controllers.

Such visions of the future 'are not going to become reality tomorrow, but probably in the not-too-distant future,' Michel Wachenheim, France's representative at ICAO