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When we look at the various ways of travel, none has been more important than the passenger jet. In all honesty, the jet has probably been the best invention until the world wide web. We can now travel distances in a hour with what Lewis and clark did in 2 months. 4 hours to do what a train can only do in 2 days. 8 hours for a flight that took weeks for ships to travel. You can go anywhere in the world in less than a day thanks to jets. This means that tourism goes up, business men can get down to business quicker and it creates a lot of jobs for the airlines. Now here is the problem. More and more, we are seeing a declining trend in the airlines. They lose more money even when they are getting more and more passesngers flying each year. This alarming trend is very bad. Basically if we lose the airlines, businesses will go into a halt and we will see a depression that would put the Great Depression to shame. We are talking about the collapse of nations and that collapse will happen because the airlines will fail. Now to be fair, we have other forms of transportation. Wel have the rail, but there are drawbacks. Even the fastest maglev goes almost half as fast as a jet. When speed is introduced, then the safety of the train is compromised. All you need is one derailment, one power out on a maglev and they will crash into the ground at 300 MPH without a seatbelt. Not to mention that rail stations have usually only 2 destinations whereas a plan can go from any airport to any airport. Road is the same way. We can increase the car's speed. That's not a huge issue. The Bugatti Veryon can go up to 250 MPH, but that is a strain on fuel and safety. Not to mention the price of the engine gets higher as it gets more performance which is it's biggest flaw. Then we have ships and of course the issues with that is they are restricted to water and they are slow. Now is there something we can do? Well there are some things, but losing jets is like losing the internet. The economy is built around it. Think our economy would be the same if we didn't have electricity? Hell no, but as we have learned, we are so used to electricity powering everything, citites panick and shut down because we are so used to the convenience.

The airlines though they are getting more passengers, they are making less and less money. Making air travel work in a business perspective is rather new to us. It's a hit and miss science. It'll be a business failure, not a failure of physics or society.

A lot of business is done through telecommunication because it's cheaper and more efficient than face-to-face meetings. Air travel isn't really as vital for that as you seem to think it is. An exception is actually moving goods around.

If the airlines fail it will be because of a lack of adaptation. The government can't get involved because everyone would flip s**t about government takeover of the free market. The thing is, if you fail to or refuse to adapt to the free market then you're going to fail as a business.

Personally, I'm more concerned about our electrical and telecommunications infrastructure going down more than I am about the failure of air travel. Costs going up and profits going down is a fact of life for everyone in the current economic climate. It's comforting to see that the airlines are facing the same difficulties, in my opinion, rather than posting record profits like some of those on Wall Street.

It can't be entirely replaced, otherwise it most likely would have been already. I know how difficult it can be to explain things or work out details over the phone, but now we have videoconferencing. Still, this can't always substitute an in-person meeting.

Really though, if the economy was forced to slow down some then that might not be a bad thing. Maybe we wouldn't be held captive by the caprices of global stock markets that can rise one day and then plummet the next. The airlines will most likely do something to stay afloat, most likely just raise prices. It used to be that only people on business could afford to fly anyway.

we only have to worry about trade collaspe cause we no longer produce goods of value to the world.