A familiar scene plays out thousands of times each day across the United States: Departing airline passengers prepare to board their flight as those arriving stream into the terminal.
From the terminal gate, you can?t see much. Maybe some rushed business travelers, vacation-bound families, or cargo being offloaded onto the tarmac. Yet what just occurred will provide a jolt to the global economy.
That one airport is part of a much broader aviation ecosystem. As the U.S. economy today continues to recover from the Great Recession, airlines have in many ways become a gauge for American confidence. As America goes, so goes the U.S. airline industry.
Airlines are the physical Internet, transporting nearly 2 million passengers and nearly 50,000 tons of cargo on 27,000 flights daily. And though 580,000 people worldwide are directly employed by America?s airlines, commercial aviation drives more than 11 million American jobs ? supporting one out of every 12 ? and 5 cents of every dollar of the U.S. GDP.
THE NEW YORK – NEW JERSEY ECONOMIC HUB
Nowhere is the positive impact of the aviation industry more apparent than in America?s economic epicenter: The New York-New Jersey region. Served by three large hubs and other smaller airports, New York saw 112.5 million air travelers in 2013, while moving nearly 2 million tons of cargo.
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