Sorry but I don't think this analogy works. How many people would it take to lift a plane 38,000 feet into the air at 600 mph? You can't measure the usefulness of jet travel by such labor utility metrics, it's nonsense.

Perhaps you can quantify how much gasoline and time jets save as compared to other methods of travel, such as by train or boat. But going on some hypothetical equivalent of Google search with hundreds of thousands of librarians made me stop reading midway through.