The Bureau of Transportation Statistics released some astounding findings this week from the "National Household Travel Survey, 2001-2002," one of which tells a story about just how important air travel is to Americans.

Although the BTS notes that, "Nine out of 10 long-distance trips are by personal vehicle," and just "7 percent of long distance trips are by air," those numbers alone don't tell the story.

First of all, "long-distance" trips, to the BTS, are those that go at least 50 miles from the traveler's home.

As one might suspect, "Personal vehicles are used for almost all trips less than 300 roundtrip miles."

Airplanes are better, and appear more time-economical, for trips of greater distance.

ANN has said for a long time that, due to the hassles involved in commercial air travel (which have only increased since September 11, 2001), for reasonable-Wx trips of under 300 miles, you're generally smarter driving your car than taking a commercial flight; between 300 and 500 miles, it's personal preference; and over 500 miles (one way), commercial airline travel still, nearly always, beats driving, on every front (usually including expense -- at least for the single traveler).

These newly-released findings seem to support our theories, in that, "Nearly three-fourths of trips over 2,000 roundtrip miles were made by airplane," and the median distance traveled by air is 2068 miles. (By car, it's 194 miles.)

Of the 2.6 billion "long-distance trips" Americans take each year, .6 billion are commercial air trips. That accounts for a huge part of the 1.3 trillion long-trip miles we log, as a nation.

'Statistical extrapolation:'

While "median" (the number in the middle of the data) and "mean" (average of the data) are decidedly NOT the same, these measures of central tendency do tend to approach each other, as the sample size increases. With a population of 600 million (the number of emplanements), and a distance of 2068 miles (round trip -- counting for 2 emplanements), we could guess pretty closely that commercial air travel accounts for nearly 50% of all long-distance miles traveled by Americans. Even if ALL commercial flights involved a stop enroute (clearly a stretch of credulity), commercial air travel would account for a fourth of Americans' long-distance miles.

Add to that, the fact that, "57 percent of long distance trips are made by travelers with a total household income of $50,000 or more," and we can see that air travelers are a group of folks that are significant in the economy. If we could get organized politically, we could make the TSA provide security, instead of expensive showy hassles...

FMI: www.bts.gov