Chapter 1: Introduction and Overview

An efficient air transport system is critical to countries attaining and sustaining healthy economies, especially given the increasingly interconnected world economy. Increasingly, companies are looking beyond their domestic markets in selling their goods and services, and they are sourcing components from all over the globe in order to produce goods and services at the lowest costs and in the highest quality. According to the U.S. International Trade Administration, international trade accounts for more than 60 percent of global GDP. In the United States, almost 305,000 companies export goods to more than 230 destinations, and 98 percent of the companies involved in exports are small- and medium-sized (Han & Soroka, 2014). Further, firms are increasingly obtaining component parts from all over the globe. An example is the Apple iPhone 6. According to CompareCamp.com, in creating the iPhone 6, Apple uses suppliers from more than 30 different countries and assembles the phones in China and Brazil (CompareCamp.com).