The COVID-19 pandemic is continuing its unprecedented assault on the airline industry, with thousands of workers laid off, thousands of flights canceled and projections of revenue losses of up to $300 billion or more. Industry experts predict a long road to recovery.
“This is not business as usual,” Stephen Creamer, director of the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) Air Navigation Bureau, said during a Flight Safety Foundation webinar in early April.
Creamer and other international aviation specialists agreed that, although air traffic has historically been vulnerable to external factors such as the 2008 recession and the 2003 severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) epidemic, the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic are extreme.
ICAO offered two basic scenarios, which it emphasized were “not forecasts of what is most likely to happen” but “merely indicative of possible paths or consequential outcomes out of many.”1
In one scenario, if the f…
