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Introduction

The COVID-19 pandemic has ravaged the world, killing hundreds of thousands of people, forcing entire countries to shut down their normal activities—causing countless businesses to close and untold numbers of people to lose their jobs and their livelihood. One of the industries hit hardest by the pandemic was the air travel industry. As countries closed their borders to limit the spread of the virus and as people changed their behavior to keep themselves as safe as possible, air travel, particularly international air travel, came almost to a standstill.

At a recent workshop hosted by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, several speakers described the carnage. Laurie Garrow, the co-director of the Center for Urban and Regional Air Mobility at Georgia Institute of Technology, highlighted that air travel essentially fell off a cliff, “Never before have we seen such a drop in air demand that has lasted or been sustained at low levels for so long,” she said. In the past the airline industry has had to scale back operations in response to such things as volcanoes, hurricanes, or the 9/11 terrorist attacks, but in these instances the reduction in flights were not as significant as the impact caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. In addition, previously air travel resumed at its normal pace relatively quickly after the initial disruptive event was over.

Figure 1.1, submitted by Garrow, illustrates the drastic decline in air travel based on data published by Airlines for America. As of February 2, 2021, she emphasized, U.S. airline passenger numbers were down 65 percent from the same week of 2020, while international passenger numbers were down by 74 percent. Her figures showed that at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic U.S. domestic air travel dropped by 80 to 90 percent, while international travel from the United States fell by 96 percent. That means that for every 100 flights that U.S airlines were offering to international destinations before the pandemic, they were flying only four in the weeks after it hit. And while some international travel, such as flights to Mexico and Latin America as of February 4, 2021, flights are back to 30–40 percent of their pre-pandemic levels, travel to other parts of the world remains depressed.

Garrow also provided insight into the staggering financial implications of the rapid decline of passengers. At the beginning of the pandemic, Delta and American Airlines were losing $100 million per day—or essentially a startling $70,000 each minute for every minute of the day. To survive, the airlines have had to borrow cash at unprecedented levels, and at the end of 2020 the total debt for the U.S. airline industry was up by 63 percent over a year earlier. “The debt payments they’re making are astounding,” she said. To put these payments in perspective, the entire U.S. airline industry earned $15 billion in profit in 2019, and as of the writing of this proceedings, Delta’s adjusted net debt is $17 billion, and American’s is $33 billion. Delta alone will spend about $1.5 billion this year to pay off its debt, or 10 percent of the total pre-pandemic annual profit for the entire U.S. airline industry. American

Airlines’ situation is even worse, as it will be spending $3 billion this year to pay off its debt, or 20 percent of what the entire industry earned as a profit in the year before the COVID-19 pandemic.

The airline industry’s recovery will take several years, Garrow predicted, and many airlines will emerge from the experience significantly smaller than they were before the pandemic. Many others will not survive. She indicated that although the U.S. airline industry has not had any bankruptcies, in large part because of government support, in other places such as Latin America, where the governments have not been providing support, there have been numerous airlines declaring bankruptcy.

It is not just large airlines such as Delta and American that have been hit hard by the pandemic, observed, Nobuyo Reinsch, the vice president of Aviation Safety and Security at the Regional Airline Association. If anything, U.S. regional airlines have suffered even more. Regional airlines operate about 40 percent of all U.S. departures, or more than 116 million passengers each year. Furthermore, 66 percent of the nation’s commercially serviced airports are served exclusively by regional airlines. Thus, regional airlines provide more than half of the air service in 30 states and more than 75 percent of air service in 15 states, she pointed out.

Reinsch went on to present data on the impact on regional airlines. Five regional airlines ceased operations in 2020: Compass Airlines, ExpressJet, Pen Air/Ravn Alaska, and TransStates Airlines. Most stopped operating after losing a contract where they operate as a feeder airline to major U.S. such as Delta or American. Pen Air/Ravn Alaska filed for bankruptcy in April 2020, for example, and although Ravn Alaska has since emerged from bankruptcy under new management, it is operating with only 10 planes.

The Payroll Support Program (PSP) of the CARES Act enabled airlines to keep paying their employees at a time when passenger travel dropped to near zero, Reinsch stated, but when the program expired on September 30, 2020, regional airlines let go a total of roughly 50,000 workers over 5 days in October. When the second phase of PSP was put into effect, the airlines were able to rehire many of their workers, but airlines are still dependent on external support until air travel returns to close to normal. And even after air travel returns to pre-pandemic norms, Reinsch commented, it is possible that the U.S. air travel network will end up losing a number of smaller airports and a significant percentage of air passenger service.

James Wiltshire, assistant director for external affairs of the International Air Transport Association (IATA), provided an international perspective on the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on air travel. According to numbers from IATA, air travel around the world experienced the same, sudden reduction that U.S. domestic air travel did (Figure 1.2). Overall, in 2020 international air travel was down 66 percent as compared to 2019 as measured by the number of passengers and 70 percent as measured by revenue passenger kilometers (RPKs), a standard airline metric calculated by multiplying the number of paying passengers by the numbers of kilometers they traveled. International air travel was negatively affected much greater than domestic air travel, Wilshire said, stating that while domestic RPKs in 2020 decreased just 43 percent from levels in 2019, international RPKs dropped 85 percent from the previous year. And it is important to keep in mind, he continued, that there was still a lot of air travel going on in first quarter 2020, so that the numbers for the final three quarters were truly dire. Domestic air travel varied from country to country Wiltshire further explained. By the end of 2020, China had very limited domestic travel restrictions, and consequently the domestic passenger miles had returned to close to levels seen at the end of 2019. A similar phenomenon was true for Russia, which had fully reopened its domestic routes by the end of the 2020. South Korea actually recorded more domestic travel at the end of 2020 than at the end of 2019.

International air travel was more uniformly affected across regions, however Europe did experience a significant increase in international travel during the summer months when COVID-19 seemed under control prompting many Europeans to travel for summer holidays. International travel originating from European countries decreased once again, though, as the second COVID wave manifested. There was also a slow increase in international travel from North and Central American countries in the second half of the year, Wiltshire indicated.

Wiltshire then began to discuss air cargo where the situation is quite different than for passenger travel. He highlighted that revenue from air cargo actually increased over the course of 2020, thanks to an increased cargo demand due to the boom in e-commerce as well as COVID-related growth in demand for such things as masks and other personal protective equipment, medicines, and subsequently vaccines. The increase in cargo revenue, was not nearly enough to make up for the huge loss in passenger revenue, Wiltshire said, for 2021, global revenue from air traffic is predicted to be just half of what it had been projected to be at the end of 2019.

In March 2020, IATA estimated that airlines had on average only about six months of cash available to get through the pandemic. However significant government aid—a total of nearly $200 billion around the world—has made it possible for airlines to survive. Still, the cash position of airlines around the world is “absolutely fragile,” he warned, and the continued survival of many of them is not guaranteed.

It is against this backdrop that the workshop was held on February 4–5, 2020, via Zoom. Hosted by the Aeronautics and Space Engineering Board of the National Academies, the workshop was targeted to consider the best ways to assess and mitigate COVID-19 transmission risks experienced during air travel, defined as the interval between the entrance to the departure airport to the exit at the destination airport. The workshop was also tasked to identify areas where further research should be directed to address any gaps in understanding how to assess and mitigate transmission risks. Identifying, managing and mitigating the risks for transmission of COIVD-19 during air travel is a global issue due to the interconnectedness of the airline industry and must be addressed in a globally coordinated manner.. Therefore, the workshop included international experts from a broad range of areas, including airlines, airports, and original equipment manufacturers, such as Boeing and Airbus, representatives of airline industry professional organizations and individuals from multiple academic specialties. The goal of the workshop was to initiate a cross-cutting dialogue between the multiple stakeholders in the aviation industry with public health researchers and organizations; a dialogue that would hopefully spur research resulting in carefully constructed, scientifically peer-reviewed papers addressing the critical issues identified.

This workshop proceedings documents the presentations and discussions held during the workshop, and is presented as a synthesis of the workshop. Chapter 2 describes the contents of three keynote presentations providing details about the COIVD-19 pandemic that laid the foundation for the rest of the workshop. Chapter 3 discusses COVID-19 risks and mitigation on commercial aircraft, while Chapter 4 covers risks and mitigation in airports. Chapter 5 describes the response of the aviation industry to the COVID-19 pandemic to date, while Chapter 6 offers a look to the future and a discussion of ways the aviation industry can improve its response to the COVID-19 pandemic and, more generally, improve its performance and agility as it moves into the future.

The opinions expressed by workshop attendees and reproduced here are those of the individual speakers and are not the position of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. The workshop presenters and audience members were not asked to reach any consensus opinions, and any recommendations were those of individuals, not the group as a whole, although there were various areas in which there was apparent widespread agreement among those at the workshop, and those areas are noted, as appropriate.

Finally, it should be noted that for consistency, the virus is referred to as COVID-19 or just COVID. Some presenters referred to it as SARS-CoV-2, but that name for the virus is not used in this proceedings (except right here).