ABSTRACT
The airborne populace In 2006, 21-year-old Tobias Gutt booked an airline ticket on the Internet to what he thought was Sydney, Australia. He departed from his native Germany on December 23 lightly clad in preparation for what he expected to be a four-week holiday in the balmy Australian summer. He was surprised that his itinerary took him to the US en route to Australia; but only realized his mistake when, after having first stopped in Portland, Oregon and then Billings, Montana, he was directed to board a 19-seat commuter flight to Sidney, Montana – 14,000 kilometers from his intended destination (CNN 2006)! Such incidents are not exactly common, although a Sydney, Australia-bound British couple ended up in Sydney, Nova Scotia in 2002 via a similar mistake. Yet what is emblematic about Mr. Gutt’s experience is how fast he ended up so far off-course. Less than 24 hours after his departure, he was 14,000 kilometers astray. Going far and going fast are the defining qualities of the airborne world – even if that occasionally means going far and fast in the wrong direction. Of course, most people go in the right direction. Ending up in Sidney instead of Sydney was a beginner’s mistake. The frequency of air travel today is such that most travelers to Sidney and Sydney – and Sydney, Nova Scotia, too – are aviation veterans, frequent flyers quick to recognize that “SDY” is not “SYD.” This chapter is about people in the airborne world. In 2007, the total number of passengers reached nearly 2.3 billion, up by more than 50 percent in just a decade (Flint 2008). The increased number of flyers has been matched by the increased diversity of trip purposes. In the US, just over 50 percent of airline trips are pleasure-related; another 8 percent are for personal business; and, incredibly, 3 percent of trips are undertaken by commuters (BTS 2006a). A minority of air journeys is now work-related. The endless variety of reasons that motivate airline trips is testament to the penetration of aviation deep into the interstices of the lives of millions. For the world’s Muslims, for instance, air travel has transformed the pilgrimage to Mecca. A journey that once took months on foot or at sea is now made mainly by air. Furthermore, inexpensive air charters have made the journey affordable to believers even in some of the poorest countries; in 2002, the pilgrims numbered
2.5 million (versus 300,000 in 1965) and included more Indonesians than Saudi citizens (Bukhari 2002). In the United States, the images associated with Thanksgiving now include not only roasted turkey and the cartoon balloons of the Macy’s parade but also airports teeming with people rewinding some of the family ties that air travel has helped to stretch. In China, meanwhile, air travel is beginning to challenge the country’s trains as the principal means via which the millions of migrants to the booming cities in the east return to their provincial villages for the Chinese New Year celebration (Chiu 2005). And in Bangalore and Bangkok (among other developing world destinations), thousands of “medical tourists” arrive by air each year for surgical operations that are either higher in quality or lower in cost than what is available in the patient’s home country. Despite the growth of myriad kinds of air traffic across the world, the everyday importance of flight remains highly uneven. An estimated minimum of 84 percent of American adults have flown at least once (Greenberg 2001); conversely, in India, less than 1 percent of the population had in 2005 (Mathews 2005). The US and Europe are part of the “fast world;” most of Africa and India belongs to “the slow world.” The marginalization of the poor in the world’s airline networks is not surprising. For the same pattern is evident in the sea freight networks, telecommunications networks, and that most celebrated of networks: the Internet. Unequal access to the latter has fueled discussions of a global “digital divide” (Hammond 2001), but the older inequality in physical accessibility is a more intractable problem. In the Philippines, for instance, cell phones and Internet cafes are common even in the country’s poorest regions, but the sky remains beyond the means of the great majority of Filipinos. To put matters in perspective, for the nearly 50 percent of Philippine population that lives on less than $2 per day, the typical airfare from Manila to San Francisco represents at least two years’ income. In the poorest countries of Asia, Latin America, and especially Africa, the network of air services remains remarkably thin because too much of the population on the ground simply cannot afford the ticket to join the world aloft. Thus it is unsurprising that the busiest hubs and most heavily trafficked passenger routes are found in upper-and middle-income countries (Table 8.1). It is hubs and routes such as these that mediate the increasingly global scale flow of passenger traffic. The writer Pico Iyer (1995) discovered that the Traveler’s Aid desk at the Los Angeles International Airport (LAX) dispensed help in Pangasinan, Waray-Waray, Dari, and dozens of other languages (Iyer 1995). It is no coincidence that all five of the Disney theme parks are located near one of the world’s thirty busiest airports (see below). Neither is it a coincidence that each of the four flights hijacked on September 11, 2001 originated from or was destined to one of these 30 hubs; nor is it surprising that the international spread of Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) in 2003 only began in earnest when the disease reached Hong Kong (Bowen and LaRoe 2006). With these far-reaching implications in mind, this chapter deals with three kinds of airline passengers: business travelers, tourists, and immigrants. The first two groups fill most airline seats. The last group is far smaller in number but potent in influence.
