Suppose you were planning to book yourself on the Continental shuttle from Oakland to Los Angeles. Well, forget it. Not because the web site's down, or there's a problem at LAX; that flight just doesn't exist anymore.
Neither do hundreds of others, and if the analysts are right, neither will several of the actual airlines once taken for granted and equated with normal travel in the United States. That's because there is no such thing as normal air travel in this country anymore.
More than a hundred thousand airline jobs are gone already, and no one's yet calculated what it all means for car rentals, hotels, food service. Amidst the storm, it's increasingly clear: this is no blip.
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Jim Mathews, Managing Editor of Aviation Week's AviationNow.com
James Fallows, National Correspondent for The Atlantic Monthly and author of "Free Flight: From Airline Hell to a New Age of Travel."
