So if my business relied on airfreight I am leveraged by the airlines, the airport owners, the aircraft makers, the pilots unions, the oil companies ....
So logically anyone who wants to ship a physical product should start by developing their own oil well and aluminium ore mine.
The better analogy would be: if you business depends on Delta Airlines you should have a good chat with other Airlines to expand your business. It' s a common pattern in the non-virtual world that dependency on one exclusive channel/customer (Ask textile producers in Pakistan about IKEA) is prone to fail.
And indeed, if your business depends on airfreight you will also be strongly coupled to the destiny of that part of the industry. There's no need to develop your own oil well, but to have a vision about alternatives is a good thing in that case. Branson's Virgin sells records. And airtravel. And Mobiles. Would he have survived by betting exclusively on Sony MiniDisc ?
Well, for what it's worth, airlines do engage in quite a bit of commodity price collaring in order to ensure that fuel price fluctuations don't totally destroy their business model. This is in some respects de-leveraging at least as far as this conversation is concerned :)
So logically anyone who wants to ship a physical product should start by developing their own oil well and aluminium ore mine.