Will Aviation be the first sector which will change drastically due to the Corona crisis?

In some countries life is restarting again, others are still in pretty strict lockdown regulations. Some sectors are already feeling the impact of all the measurements. Like in all situation some sectors will blossom, in this case mostly online related sectors, while others will bleed very hard.

This is a situation in which sectors can re-invent themselves, like for instance michelin star restaurants which suddenly have take-away, others will more or less be doomed. The only things they can do is to downsize and close business.

Take for instance the aviation sectors, which we will have to seperate into 2 part. We have on one side the people transportation branche and on the other side the cargo flights. One is blooming, the other is bleeding.

This morning the figures from April were made public from Zaventem, which is the main airport in Belgium.
Last year in April there were 2.3M passingers, compare this to last month where they only had to serve 17000 passengers. As you can see it has almost vaporized. If the current lockdown would be the same in May, the figures would even decrease a lot more. Those 17K passengers were passengers desperatly trying to get home or trying to get into the country again.

The Cargo is doing much better. Okay there was a decrease in volume, but this is mainly because lot's of cargo is also send via passengers flight. But the number of Cargo flights did increase with 50%.

Brussels airlines announced yesterday that they have to lay off 1000 employes, sell 10 planes and decrease the number of destinations with around 20. They do feel an immediate impact of the crisis and also have the common sense that in the next years the number of passengers still will decrease compared to the pre-corona times.
There is no way that they can re-invent themselves. They did try this numerous of times already. But they way they did try to re-invent the sector was making the flights cheaper by staking more people into a plane and offer less and less services. We now know that putting as much people as possible into a small closed area isn't very appealing anymore. Also the business world now sees that it isn't so important anymore to fly around the world for a quick meeting, more and more meeting and events will be done online! So another decrease in potential passengers.

But the avation is more than the pilots and stewards. They is a lot of ground personal involved. And there is a big correlation with the tourism industry.
Regardless of the fact that this is a blessing for our ecosystem, people are loosing their income. Without economics, probably all countries still would have a very stricht lockdown. But governments not only have to protect the health of the people they are also forced to the protect the economy. It almost feels like a catch 22.

Cheers,
Peter