W7 Research Blog

Quentin Miller
12 April, 2018
Senior Project
W7 Research Blog

 Air Transportation and Globalization
In today’s increasingly globalized world where connection, efficiency, time, and speed are valued, air travel and transportation plays a crucial role in connecting the world’s people, commodities, and cultures. Each day, there are over 100,000 commercial flights (excluding cargo flights) that transport over 1.7 million people (and cargo) between more than 17,000 commercial airports. Airplanes have created a whole new realm of mobility that enables people to travel further and faster in less time than any other form of transportation (by a large margin). In addition to serving as the go to for long distance passenger travel, air traffic is responsible for a large portion of long distance shipping, especially on the international scale. In a world where most goods and services must cross vast expanses of open ocean before being sold, air transportation of freight and other cargo enables the global economy to maintain its interconnectivity and efficiency. As a result, the invention of high capacity airplanes have redefined perceptions of time, distance, space, and even political/governmental/national territory for people and goods. Without airplanes, the economy as we know it could not exist.
Many goods that are time sensitive like fragile produce or other products that age quickly like fish could not moved to foreign destinations. People in central, land-locked states like Kansas can enjoy fresh fish from other countries or continents that was harvested less than a day in the past. Surprising, yet easily possible with air transportation. In the same way that railroads redefined notions of distance and accessibility to larger populations for settlers in the American West, air transportation has allowed people settled in highly remote corners of the earth to have nearly equal access to many goods and services that other people living in large urban areas are familiar with. In remote towns on the Alaskan and Canadian tundras that have no roads leading to them. Planes provide inhabitants with access to goods, medical care, law enforcement, and serve as a gateway to the rest of the world that not only exists, but that is accessible to nearly all people. As airplane and air travel technology continues to improve, air transportation allows us to move faster and farther in less time and for less cost. Because of air transportation, living above the Arctic Circle is no longer synonymous for isolation. Even during the winters, many cities in Alaska can enjoy the same fresh produce from Chile that Californians do.
In addition to this new facility with which air travel and transportation afford to the world’s societies, it can also fundamentally changes people’s perceptions of distance. From a city like San Francisco, both New York City and Los Angeles are five hours away, that is, by air and car, respectively. Unlike the actual shift in recognition of distance initiated by the railroad, many people still fail to equate distance in the same light as the analogy above. This inability to actually view the five hours as equal in significance (in terms of time) is interesting given the seemingly different response to the onset of the popularity of rail travel. This is most likely because, as humans and as a species, air transportation is not only new but is something that is fundamentally different from what humans were evolved to do. Ground transportation is much more akin to running than air travel is. As the world becomes even more connected and as air travel becomes even more accessible to large portions of the world’s populations, it is undoubtable that air transportation will take humans as a species to never before seen heights.


Bibliography
Avakian, Talia. “Here's How Many Planes Are in the Air at Any Moment.” Travel + Leisure, Time
Inc., 19 May 2017, www.travelandleisure.com/airlines-airports/number-of-planes-in-air.
BTS. “TranStats.” Bureau of Transportation Statistics, BTS, www.transtats.bts.gov/.
Button, Ken. The Impacts of Globalisation on International Air Transport Activity. The Impacts of
Globalisation on International Air Transport Activity, School of George Mason University, 2008.
IATA. “Search.” IATA Facts & Figures, IATA,


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