The Busy Skies

On America’s busiest travel day, it’s worth pulling back — or up — to marvel at how the globe has been so thoroughly knitted by aviation. About 2 million Americans are in the air on a typical day. In 2009, 4.796 billion passengers traveled through the world’s airports. A dizzying variety of products flows through the skies worldwide (the impact on commerce from the eruption of one volcano in Iceland illustrated this). And of course less welcome things move this way, as well. It’s very likely that a jet carried West Nile virus to North America in 1999.




http://dotearth.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/11/24/the-busy-skies/


Original content Bob DeMarco, Look Beyond the Obvious