You are sitting in seat 48K with a pillow propped behind your head, cruising over the North Atlantic Ocean at mach 0.85 at 36,000 feet where the temperature outside your window is -70°F. Meanwhile, you are calmly sipping on a tomato juice spiced with Worcestershire sauce, eating some mini pretzels. Some estimate there are about 1 million other people in the sky with you at any given moment. Most people take this for granted.

One of the primary tools of globalization, which has radically changed the world since the early 20th century, is the airplane. In 2016, IATA predicts there will be 3.8 million airline passengers who will travel across the globe on over 54,000 routes.

This is part of a longer ongoing project about how aviation affects us, and our planet.