DocAndersen
Today’s pictures come from my first trip to Mexico City, Mexico. My wife was able to go along on the journey, my parents had both retired and came up to our house to stay with the kids (they were in school). I like traveling with my wife more than traveling alone. We, my wife and I have a comfort level that comes with years of being together. But it is also that she is a dear friend—one of those people that you want to talk to and hang out with. But today, I wanted to focus more on the reality of the fragility of travel. As we are all in Lockdown now (airlines travel in the US is down by as much as 93% overall), the world is different. After 9/11 in the US, travel changed.
Travel is changing again now. The bad thing I suspect will be that airfares are going to go up to replace that lost revenue. But it will also change in that people will now think before boarding that plane. I know that cruise ships got a bad reputation from the virus. And I do understand that people often consider them floating Petri dishes. But the reality of the spread of this virus is that Cruise Ship didn’t spread it. Yes, it spread on Cruise Ships, but it was not covered by cruise ships. It was spread by airplanes and air travel—tourists and business travelers that traveled to China or perhaps Italy later on. Then flew somewhere else carrying the little pieces of that virus with them.
Air travel is going to change again. It is time for us to consider that air travel has a risk. I remember traveling when I was 8, on a propeller plane from Indianapolis to Milwaukee. It took 2 hours to fly a distance that a Jet covers in around 39 minutes. That 39 minutes used to be the small part of my morning commute when I flew from Indianapolis to Chicago. I suspect the world now has to consider the reality of quick air travel. Should we quickly close specific places? I am not blaming China. The next disease could come from Europe, the US, or Canda. There is no limit to where bad things happen. But will the world learn from this pandemic? Will we, in the future, limit air travel faster?
