During this holiday week in which many people will be traveling, we present some market sizes for travel, measured in the number of passenger-miles traveled by different modes of transportation. Today we look at air travel. Air carrier passenger-miles are computed by summing the products of the aircraft-miles flown on each inter airport segment multiplied by the number of passengers carried on that segment. Air travel has seen steady growth over the years as can be seen in the chart, produced with data in the source listed below.

Geographic reference: United States
Year: 2008
Market size: 583,506 million passenger-miles
Source: “Table 1-37: U.S. Passenger Miles (Millions),” Bureau of Transporation Statistics, National Transportation Statistics, available online here.