Passenger airplanes are the worst environments for spread of influenza. Airborne virus inside cabins almost always give me cold. cough or fever symptoms a day or so later.
If Ebola goes airborne, I think this becomes a major crisis.
I also dread to think about schools and children. As parents we all know how families pick up illnesses by what their children pick up at school.
I am still sitting on the fence on all of this as it could be hyped up or it could be real.
A few years ago I was sitting next to a woman on an airplane on an international (long) flight. She was coughing and sneezing. She didn't look or act like she had a fever but I worried that I would end up catching something. I wanted to change seats but the flight was full. She had a heavy eastern-European accent, maybe Czech or Polish, so I thought whatever she has must be something exotic to my own immune system.
Two to three days later I got really sick, with flu-like symptoms. I was terribly sick for the first three days, and then slowly recovered over the next week. I wonder how many others sitting on that airplane had the same problem?
You're right, airplane travel is a great way to get sick -- both from actively sick people too selfish to ground themselves, and from the surfaces touched by them (maybe from the last flight or the one before, or before that...).
That can really only happen in the petri dish in West Africa. There is such a small chance of that happening, it requires millions of new cases and even W. Africa is probably not going to get to that level. If it does happen (really bad luck) it will spread like wildfire over there and that would be very noticeable.