Quote Originally Posted by Palanan View Post
There will probably be several stepwise collapses in transportation. The airline industry will almost certainly lose 25% of its fleet in the first few hours after the Snap, along with tens of thousands of passengers, as planes crash on landing, takeoff or when they run out of fuel.
It'd be far less. It'd be *bad* of course, but a substantial percentage of the fleet is not in the air at any given time. Exact numbers depend on aircraft type, but for commercial airliners, half is a reasonable estimate. All other types of aircraft spend a far lower proportion of time in the air.

A substantial number of airlines also run three pilots. Two is required, but three is very common, and will be the case on *all* flights over 12 hrs for shift tradeoff reasons. Additionally, there is a non zero chance of a pilot flying as a passenger on jump flight.

All told, you're looking at 5-7% loss rates here. Less if a passenger can land the plane, as has happened several times.

That's a ton of deaths, an insanely chaotic day, and probably a couple of weeks shutdown, but it doesn't make transportation collapse. At the end of the day, you still have an awful lot of aircraft left, and fewer people to haul. Same goes for cargo aircraft. You end up oversupplied on equipment relative to the number of people.


These and other people would likely be prone to romanticizing the situation, especially those who pride themselves on surviving without modern conveniences in the first place. This is why a series set right after the Snap would be so interesting, because we could explore how different characters in different regions, with wildly varying degrees of scarcity, would all react to their new situation.
I do agree about this...it's fascinating world building material right there, and it's a kind of apocalypse that's notably different from the zombies, etc that we usually see.

Quote Originally Posted by hungrycrow View Post
People have mentioned boats and planes, but what about cars? Every major road in the world would be suddenly full of empty cars. That's a temporary problem sure, but it'd play havoc with whatever the initial response to the crisis was. Plus, it'd mean trucks aren't delivering anything for a while.
It's a pain in the butt initally, but they mostly still work, and they all have the keys in the ignition. It's not like an EMP scenario where they become immobile scrap...you just have a lot of wrecks to clean up, and probably most of the cars can be simply driven off the road into the ditch in the short term.