This exact same thing was said after 9/11. Air travel was never going to recover as people would never forget the memories of airplanes being used as human occupied missiles. The fear caused by those memories and the inconvenience of TSA would forever stifle business and leisure travel. The rhetoric is old. In reality, air travel eventually reached record passenger count numbers never before seen in commercial aviation. Those numbers would have been realized sooner had it not been for the recession.

This too shall pass. Will it take a few years? Of course. But to say that air travel has changed forever is ridiculous.