Travel by air

A large amount of perishable food now travels by air. Since the cargo holds of airliners are not pressurized, the problem may be one of temporary protection against low temperatures, rather than of keeping the product cold. 

Right now, we have to deal with incubation time and wait for victims to develop symptoms. The incubation time for anthrax is one to six days. In this example, anthrax victims would have one to six days between exposure and the onset of symptoms. Anthrax is not transmissible from person to person. Compare this to the incubation time with that of the virus, smallpox, which is ten to seventeen days. Smallpox is highly transmissible from person to person. After exposure to smallpox, a person could travel by air around the world a number of times and contaminate many people before developing any symptoms. However, naturally occurring smallpox has been eradicated worldwide since 1977. Terrorism could rapidly change that eradication to an attack since samples of the smallpox virus have been stored in both the United States and Russia. 

Each year the U.S. consumes almost 200 billion gallons of gasoline, diesel fuel and other transportation fuels for road travel. This is about 20% of total U.S. energy consumption. When travel by air, water, and rail is added, including pipelines energy, total transportation energy rises to almost 30% of U.S. energy consumption. 

International passenger travel has been steadily increasing over the past few decades. For example, during 1980 there were approximately 20 million passengers who arrived in the United States via air travel, while in 1995 that number was up to approximately 47 million passengers—an increase of 131%. Current estimates are that worldwide, approximately 2 billion people travel by air annually. At any given... 

Most people are happy to travel by air. In fact in the Western World, scheduled commercial air travel is one of the safest means of transport—safer than trains and certainly safer than motor vehicles. This is not to say that car or aviation accidents are acceptable. We tolerate the risks because of the benefits conferred. 

A vexed issue that flight 253 brought to bear is the effectiveness of no fly lists which contain names of persons who are considered a threat to aviation should they travel by air. These hsts are maintained by individual States (and not by Organizations such as ICAO) where such States effectively preclude the travel of a potentially dangerous passenger. This is a matter purely for the State cmicemed as the prerogative of admitting a person to its territory lies exclusively oti the State. However, the maintenance of a no fly list is not a fool proof measure as there have been occasions (such as when an 8 year old boy who shared the same name with a suspect on a no fly list was patted down by Customs authorities every time he travelled). ... 

Air transport plays an integral part in the tourism industry where 40% of international tourists travel by air. This fact underscores the indispensability of air transport to the global economy on the one hand and the resilience of the... 

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