Air travel creates more problems than benefits. Is this a fair comment?

The air travel industry has been on the rise during the recent years, causing airplanes to become the
most popular mode of transport to travel from one country to another. Air travel had brought about
many benefits to the world such as convenience and increased connectedness between countries.
However, it has also brought about several problems such as pollution and the destruction of
cultural diversity in the world which led to many people say that air travel creates more problems
than benefits, due to the extent of the problems caused by extensive air travel. However, in my
opinion, air travel brings about more benefits than problems as the benefits it brings about
outweighs the problems generated.

Air travel has provided benefits such as economic growth globally. Air travel is commonly used by
tourists, going on their holidays, business men on their business ventures overseas and the
transportation of cargo goods and mail. This is due to air travel being fast paced and easily accessible
by nearly everyone in the world, allowing relations to be built across borders which thus aids in the
global economy. Businessmen can maximize their productivity by working on the plane during flight,
as most commercial and private aircrafts have satellite phones on board. The tourism industry will
also grow due to more and more flight routes connecting various parts of the world that are
previously inaccessible. Also, commercial air travel is becoming relatively cheaper as air travel gets
more popular. For example, budget airlines charge only a few dollars for a flight of a relatively short
distance, forgoing some in-flight entertainment such as head phones for music listening. These
cheaper travel rates will thus also boost the tourism industry, resulting in economic growth globally.

Air travel has also provided employment to many people around the world. The air travel industry
offers several employment opportunities for many people with various skill sets, generating more
than 31.9 million jobs globally, which can effectively reduce the global unemployment rate by a little.
Some employment such as flight attendants, gate agents, airport security, pilots and ground crews
can allow many people to start earning their own income and contribute to their country’s gross
domestic product (total national income generated by the country). For example, airplanes are
getting bigger in size to contain more passengers for efficiency. The Singapore Airlines’ AirBus can
accommodate to more passengers due to a bigger plane size. With a bigger plane size, it will require
more flight attendants to manage the services on board, which thus opens up many employment
opportunities to people, which thus aids in economic growth of the country.

However, some may argue that the cost of managing air travel is extremely high due to the high risks
involved in air travel. One small error in the industry can lead to undesirable consequences such as
accidents. For example, the repairs of an aircraft engine have to be done carefully or the aircraft
have a higher risk of falling from the sky due to engine failure. I concede that cost of managing air
travel is high. However, with respect to the amount of economic activity generated in the air travel
industry, the cost of managing is seemingly smaller, which thus shows that air travel creases more
benefits than problems.

Air travel also helps in the spread of culture and the integration of societies due to shared ideas and
perspectives as more and more people are travelling around the world, ideas can be shared and
spread easily, which indirectly benefits the world in the long run. Nowadays, it is easier for people to
travel from one part of the world to another due to air travel being easily accessible. This will thus
result in more opportunities for people to mix together and share culture. This sharing of culture and
ideas can aid in the techno-social growth in a country. Different people have different ideas and
perspectives about things. By bringing and mixing people together, the world becomes more
interconnected and unified informally, bringing about benefits such as easy technology transfer that
will aid in the development of less developed countries.

However, many people tend to feel that there is a decline in cultural diversity in the world, and
making each country less unique and interesting due to the informal unification of the world. The
mixing of people also facilitates the spread of diseases such as the H1N1 swine flu, which was the
first worldwide flu pandemic. I concede that countries will tend to become less unique, but not till
the extent that every country becomes identical and homogenous. Also, the spread of illnesses can
be easily prevented by measures such as temperature scanning stations at airports, quarantine
measures, which thus allow diseases to have a lower chance of spreading through air travel.

Benefits aside, air travel also creates problems such as air and noise pollution. Air travel is a major
source of greenhouse gases, particularly carbon dioxide, water vapour and nitrogen oxides, which
contributes to 3% of the global environmental problems as it causes climatic change, ozone
depletion and the wasteful use of scarce raw materials. Researches have shown that by 2020, if the
growth of the air travel industry is as predicted, carbon dioxide emissions from the industry could be
greater than from all other transports in the regional catchments. Especially, nowadays the issue of
global warming haunts the minds of many people, environmentalists alike, the carbon dioxide that
the engine of the airplane produces will worsen the global environmental condition. Air travel also
accounts for 20% of total noise emissions by transportation. Noise coming from jet engines,
aerodynamic friction and ground craft operations disrupts the lives of people in society, as many
airports are situated in urban areas. For example, in Singapore, people living along the eastern
coastal regions tend to be heavily affected by the noise generated by aircrafts from the nearby
Changi Airport. Therefore many people will agree that air travel creates more problems than
benefits.

It may be true that the airplane produces large amounts of air pollutants when in operation.
However, as technology progresses, the air travel industry can make use of highly effective chemical
filters which will reduce the emissions greatly, reducing air pollution and even possibly cleaning the
air in the atmosphere during operation. Also, noise pollution can also be effectively reduced when
sound cushioning technologies develop to lower the noise produced from aircraft operations. This
thus makes the problems short term and therefore I believe that air travel creates more benefits
than problems and that the statement “air travel creates more problems than benefits” is not fair to
a large extent.