I have a new pet peeve - Aviation

At the end of 2007, I was marooned in a small town in which fuel and other essential commodities were missing because sections of the road had been barricaded upstream. The nightmare every logistician cannot shake from their head is the image of angry Kibera residents uprooting a railway line and the realisation that one just needs to interrupt the single railway line anywhere between Mombasa and Kisumu to disrupt the rail transport sector.

Others still cannot believe how people were ejected from buses and executed for belonging to the wrong tribe. Worse still is the randomness with which the violence erupts. One place which had somehow evaded the chaos would be up in flames - right under the noses of the authorities.

I dont know which Google founder said this, but I suspect they said it during Ted Africa held in Arusha last year. He said Africa should be building less roads and more airports because very light jets make much more sense than buses. This was the same place he said we should allow computers to drive cars beacuse they are much more safer.

This year, a seed is in my heart - to fight for aviation for the people. The big question I have been asking is this: why is flying expensive?

My immediate guesses as to the answer is: scale. Not enough people are making planes in a sufficient scale to make them affordable. I could be wrong. Maybe planes are made of very exotic materials. Really, flying is a rich persons thing in Africa.

Please tell me why because I think it should not be.