ABSTRACT
Meanwhile, trucks, freight trains, and containerships have also lost a measure of their business to air transportation, although railroads and shipping lines remain much more important than in passenger travel. By one estimate, air cargo accounts for 40 percent of world trade by value (Kasarda et al. 2004) – though less than 1 percent by weight. Where we vacation, how large and anonymous our employers are, what we eat and wear, how far we live from our relatives and how often we see them, where our cell phones were assembled, where our neighbors were born, which infectious diseases scare us – these and many other dimensions of everyday life on the ground at the beginning aviation’s second century are shaped, to varying degrees, by commercial aviation. In fact, by the Wright Brothers’ centennial, air transportation had become the most important element of the world’s circulatory system, moving millions of people and a rising share of trade in goods at speeds so high, over distances so great, and at costs so low that in the process the way the world works has been changed. This book is about the world that air transportation has made, both on the ground and in the sky above us.
