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Good riddance- with any luck the post COVID-19 world will be one with less reliance on air travel for the atmosphere's sake. Especially in the numbers that once made airplane designers believe the 747 and A380 could be economically viable.

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If you need to do air travel, these larger airplanes are better then smaller airplanes per passenger.

The lifecycle impact of a 747 is much worse than a 737 or an Embraer 145: https://escholarship.org/content/qt6m5865v5/qt6m5865v5.pdf

Regardless of the plane size however, there's no getting around planes depositing pollution in the upper atmosphere is worse than we thought and cannot be thought of in the same way as emissions from a train or power plant: https://www.newscientist.com/article/2207886-it-turns-out-pl...

Running an electric train on a transatlantic -- or transpacific -- trip causes an awful lot of environmental degradation, too.

I believe the alternative to phasing out air travel isn't finding another mode of transport to replace it but instead asking whether or not in a world with teleconferencing and the internet if it's worth the damage to be physically moving people around.

You can't compare teleconferencing with in-person interactions. They aren't the same.

Not only that but 747s are often doing transarctic travel, dropping soot on the arctic ice.

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