Is Air Travel Expected to Increase?

The US Federal Aviation Commission expects air travel to double between 2011 and 2032. During this time, analysts predict that the distance flown by paying passengers will increase from 814 billion miles (1.31 trillion km) in 2011 to 1.57 trillion miles (2.53 trillion km) in 2032. Analysts expect cargo flight distances to increase even more, going from 37 billion miles (59.5 billion km) in 2011 to nearly 102 billion miles (164.2 billion km) in 2032.

More about air travel:

  • The number of general aviation aircraft is expected to increase by almost 14% between 2011 and 2032.

  • The most significant change in air travel will be in international distances flown. These are expected to increase, on average, by 4.4% each year until 2032.

  • Some environmentalists discourage air travel because of the carbon emissions produced by airplanes. Research shows that people in Europe who travel to London, Brussels and Paris via airplane generate 10 times the emissions as those who use the Eurostar train system.
More Info: www.businessinsider.com

Discussion Comments

Hackenabush

1,570,000,000. plus 102,000,000. = 1,570,102,000,000 miles per year.

A 747 uses 8.33 gallons of aviation fuel per mile, which equals 13,078,949,660,000 gallons per year equals 37,368,427,600 tons, producing 87,815,804,860 tons of CO2 pollutant, or about 450 tons per square mile of the earth’s surface every year. Then double this for road transport.

If this isn’t suicidal, I don’t know what is. Who is going to stop this from happening? No one.

whitewater

What are the carbon emissions of jet flight now, which this little news bite of an article is suggesting will be doubled in the next 20 years? We've already destroyed the north polar ice cap with its barely understood shielding capacity for the planet's temperature equilibrium. (Of course that allows the fools to drill for even more oil!)

Lemmings, just compulsive lemmings, rushing pell mell to our collective doom.

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